Management and Organizational History

A Research Overview

Albert J. Mills, Milorad M. Novicevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138485891
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351047906
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Management and organizational history has grown into an established field of research with competing and contrasting approaches and methods that are relevant for management and organization studies.

This short-form book provides readers with expert insights on intellectual interventions in management and organization history. The authors illuminate the central ideas, works, and theorists involved in forming the link between history, management, and organization studies, particularly focusing on the debates addressing the need for a 'historic turn' in management and organizational studies.

With coverage of nascent schools of thought in management historiography, such as ANTi-History, revisionist history, counter-history, rhetorical history, the Copenhagen School, microhistory, critical realist histories, alongside existing modernist and post-modernist approaches, as well as postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist critiques, the book is essential reading for scholars and students learning or exploring the role of history in management and organization studies.

1 History and authorship

Introduction

This book explores key scholarly debates around the inclusion of historical approach and the role of the past in studies of management and organization. The importance of these debates is twofold. On the one hand, they have drawn attention to the dominance of an ahistorical trend within management and organization studies (MOS): a trend that has grown over much of the Cold War era and beyond. On the other hand, the debates have revealed the dominance of an atheoretical thought within the related fields of business, management, and organizational history.

The outcome – far from being conclusive – has been a growing need not only to articulate the role of the past in MOS but also to conceptualize the relationship between history, theory, and the past. If this need were met, we would be able to move beyond giving historical accounts of MOS towards a new and exciting fusion of history and MOS. In this book, we set out the ingredients for such a new approach by reviewing critically a number of key contributions to, what has become known as, the “historic turn in Management and Organization Studies” (Clark & Rowlinson, 2004).

We hope that this journey of revisiting these contributions will expose the reader to many of the central ideas, works, and theorists involved in the link between history and MOS, particularly through debates about the need for an “historic turn.” Indeed, we have structured the book in such a way that we use key items of debate around the historic turn to introduce disparate thinkers and events that help us to understand the complex role of the past in management and organizational theory.

In our first chapter, we raise some of the underlying aspects of the production of history. We begin by problematizing the relationship of authorship to historical accounts. We then move on to consideration of the role of narratives before discussing the issue of the historian and (historical) context. This leads us to consideration of history-making and the various agents (or actors) involved in the creation of a sense of history. We conclude with a far-ranging discussion of the role of archives in the production of history.

In Chapter 2, we discuss the influence of starting points on historical accounts and use this discussion to explain and segue into our particular starting point of “the historic turn,” around which we introduce various actors and debates in the emerging field of management and organizational history. This sets up our own specific study of the historic turn and its role in the development of the field.

Chapter 3 provides an amodernist account of the development of the historic turn and the implications for study of the production of history. Per the modernist, past events are interpreted as facts.

In Chapter 4, we examine the debates generated by the historic turn and Booth and Rowlinson’s (2006) associated manifesto for the development of management and organizational history.

In the final chapter, we revisit the historic turn ten years upon its launching by Clark and Rowlinson (2004) and examine its impact on recent and sharpening debates between positivist and postmodernist historiography. We also examine the extent to which postmodernism brought about by the historic turn has helped to redefine the field of management and organizational history while failing to engender feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial voices.

We hope that our journey through debates around the historic turn will serve as a heuristic to reveal the relationships between communities of practice and the production of historical accounts in management and organizational studies.

Warning: men at work – authorship and historical accounts

Before we take you any further, down the journey mapped in this book, we need to alert you to the hidden obviousness of the book’s authorship. Namely, this is a book produced by two men of European heritage who have made their careers in North America. Milorad is from Serbia, gained his PhD at the University of Oklahoma, where he was trained by Daniel Wren, the iconic management historian, and works at the University of Mississippi in the USA. Albert is from the UK, gained his PhD at the University of Durham, and works at Saint Mary’s University in Canada. That much is obvious. Less obvious, hidden in fact, is the potential influence of our former and current experiences on how we have come to understand history, the past, management, and organizational studies. Even less obvious is the fact that our engagement with the past, history, and theory is socially constructed in a myriad of ways. Let’s explore a few examples. To start with, being men is a powerful influence on how we have come to view the world. We have related to people and events over our separate lifetimes through our embodiment. Thus, it can be argued that our relationship to people and events is profoundly gendered. It does not mean that we do not reflect on our embodiment and its impact on what and how we study. It does mean that it is something that we all need to reflect on when making sense of past and extant events. Another point of reflection is on our respective sense of ethnicity. Again, our embodied and cultural experiences have undoubtedly shaped how we have come to view the world. And again, it does not necessarily fix us in a solitary position or viewpoint, but it does challenge us to question our own position in the understanding and construction of historical accounts of eventful and meaningful phenomenon such as feminism, colonialism, and class.

History in translation¹

Feminist studies of history are plentiful, but few have been taken up in management and organizational history. A good starting point is the work of Sonya Rose (2010), who provides a useful overview of historians’ engagement with gender. Also pivotal is the work of Joan W. Scott (2007), who discusses history-writing as critique and argues that gender is historically produced. In terms of management and organization studies a useful example is the work of Joan Acker and Donald van Houten (1974), who re-examined the Hawthorne Studies (Mayo, 1933; Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939) from a gender lens. Acker and van Houten argue that had the Hawthorne Studies included a focus on gender it would have generated very different results in terms of outcomes for male and female employees and for the way the emergent domain of MOS would have been characterized.

There have also been numerous works published over the past three decades that have critiqued history as the outcome of postcolonial thinking addressing the legacy of colonialism. In particular, the work of Edward Said (1978, 1993) has had a profound influence on management and organizational history, as reflected in the work of Anshuman Prasad (2003). More recently, some management and organizational history scholars (e.g., Faria, Ibarra-Colado, & Guedes, 2010) have been drawn to the work of Walter Mignolo (1991) and other Latin American decolonial scholars.

There have also been a substantial number of historical accounts that focus on the relevance of class for organizational history. The outstanding examples are Stewart Clegg and David Dunkerley’s (1980) account of organization, class and control and also Clegg’s (1981) work on history as organizational sedimentation and rules.

To return to our discussion of authorship, we are not simply saying that in writing history related to management and organizations we need to be more profoundly reflective, particularly when addressing the themes of feminism, colonialism, and class. We are saying not only that but much more. We are contending that the social background of authorship plays a critical role in the development of historical accounts that goes far beyond attempts to reflect on the influence of self on historical facts. As we shall discuss throughout the book, authorship and its context are a critical part of understanding history.

Narrative forms of history

Few historians would ignore the role of narrative in constructing a historical account. Many “factual” (Rowlinson, 2004) historians would nowadays agree that historical facts are given meaning through a narrative account. The facts may be the facts, but they don’t actually “speak for themselves” (White, 1984). The historian must decide where to start and end a particular historical account; as well as why a story that emerges from the study provides plausible account. In this way, the historian places importance on his or her craft (Bloch, 1953), the viability and verifiability of archival materials (Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest, 1984), and his or her own ability to carefully emplot (White, 1973) a plausible but real account (Iggers, 1997). At the centre of this approach are the cognitive abilities and training of the historian.

History in translation

Michael (Mick) Rowlinson (2004) distinguishes between three types of historians, each with its own approach and influences. The factual historian, as typified by the work of Alfred Kieser² (1994), views “history as a repository of facts” that come to “be known . . . [through] the work of historians” (Rowlinson, 2004, p. 8). The skills of the historian include the ability to select and interpret the facts in contexts of ambiguity and ideological preferences.

The narrative historian, exemplified by the work of Hayden White (1984, 1987),³ shifts attention away from archival research per se to “the conventions and customs of writing that constitute the craft of history. Here the challenge for the historian is to construct a convincing and plausible narrative of historical events.”

The “archaeo-genealogical” historian, typified by Foucault (1972), moves the focus of historical examination even further from the other approaches by decentering human motivation and “the conscious human actor” (Rowlinson, 2004, p. 16) to the core of discursive relationships that flow through the thinking of human subjects and of the historian. However, – strangely enough – less attention is given to the thinking of the latter.

In discussing the different historians’ approaches to writing history, Rowlinson suggests that there are several influences on the historian that include but go beyond cognitive skills and abilities to reconstruct past reality in a modernist, seemingly objective manner. Narrative writing, for example, is not only influenced by particular skills but also by customs and conventions of writing and by powerful discourses of being that shape the way historians think. In the latter case, Rowlinson (2004) seems to suggest that history is not simply written by the historian but that it is also influenced by other social forces that shape such things as who is constituted and legitimized as “the historian” and what is constituted as “history.” Indeed, Rowlinson (2004) goes on to question the extent to which the historian in the modernist account is the sole (or primary) constructor of the past, being, as he or she is, trained in “historical methods.” Interestingly, postmodernist historians who reject the possibility that the past can be reconstructed arguing that it can only be subjectively constructed, also often privilege the historian in accounts that otherwise set out to reveal the role of discourse, language, and meta-narratives in the construction of history. Callum Brown (2005), for example, is clearly writing to and for historians in his “Postmodernism for Historians.” Similarly, Alun Munslow (2010) is focused on fellow historians in his discussion of “the future of history.” Both books are peppered with references to the historian and his/her craft. Let’s look at some examples, taken at random from each book:

History in translation

Somewhat paradoxically Callum Brown (2005, p. 10) writes:

Any postmodernist historian is not being a postmodernist all of the time. Like every historian, the postmodernist must conduct empirical research, establishing that events occurred and the order of them, checking sources that verify the facts of the case, and making decisions of judgement (balance of probabilities may be the best term) where absolute certainty is not possible.

Brown’s account – although contentious in several ways (do postmodernist historians suspend their postmodernist frame for part of the time?) – is primarily directing us to the role of the historian in “history-making” (Kalela, 2012). In the process, he is arguably ignoring and/or marginalizing the many accompanying acts that go into “history-making” (Kalela, 2012) prior to/and often without the engagement of the historian. Here we are thinking of the multitude of people, things, and ideas that go into the making of historical accounts. The Finnish historian Jorma Kalela (2012, p. xi) provides some perspective on this when he examples the influence of disciplinary, popular, and public histories on the development of newer histories. For example, if a historian started out today to write a history of the “New Deal” (i.e., the policies of the administrations of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt government), he or she would find it hard to escape the influence of numerous history books on the subject (e.g., Hiltzik, 2011), various movies that deal with the era (e.g., Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), the innumerable artefacts (e.g., bridges, roads, airports) that were constructed by the Roosevelt Administration (Taylor, 2008), various archival collections (e.g., the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum), and the very idea of the New Deal itself. The writing of history is also, in itself, a pre-existing influence that shapes how certain accounts are structured (e.g., the use of footnotes), narrated (e.g., told in a particular way and style), and subjected to ideological and political pressures as well as to the governmental sources of funding (White, 1973; Zinn, 1990).

In a similar but more complex vein, Munslow (2010) talks about the challenge of history for the historian thus: “[The] beliefs of the historian positing – if the historical expression demands it – be checked against the appropriately contextualized and corroborated data available.” However, he goes on to argue, that “this logic cannot be extended to the narrative making representational and culturally expressive level of historical understanding, explanation and meaning creation.” Nonetheless, for Munslow, it is the historian who is seen to carry the burden of this approach, but he (2010, p. 3) is quick to make clear that the implications “are devastating for history of a particular kind” (i.e., the work of modernist historians). This leads him to conclude that “historians have to rethink their foundationalist and absolutist dependency on the precepts of common sense, practical realism, induction/inference, the criteria of justification as well as a range of adjacent beliefs that include ‘the truth’, ‘the meaning’, ‘objectivity’, knowable ‘agent intentionality’ and that ethics and morality can be learned from history” (Munslow, 2010, pp. 76–77).

Yet, as Kalela (2012) seeks to remind us, history is not simply the output of designated (professionally trained) historians.⁴ For Kalela (2012, p. x), “history-making is an everyday practice: people continue to make use of their experiences in all sorts of ways.” He then goes on to argue that historians “have ignored the purposes and social functions of non-academic histories” (p. x). Part of the reason for this, according to Kalela (2012), is that although only “one strand of history, the discipline has been elevated to a privileged position, with the implicit purpose of ruling over other kinds of histories” (p. x). Kalela (2012, p. 53) goes on to state that his “suggestion to shift the focus from the historian to practice is intended to have “people addressed as creators of their own histories.”

Reflecting on what we have said so far, it has been argued that historians are not the only actors to make history and that there are other actors – some human (e.g., authors), some non-human (e.g., history books), and even some abstract or non-corporeal (e.g., the idea of history itself – see Hartt, 2013) – influence, shape, and produce history.

The historian in context

Before we move on, we will unpack the rol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 History and authorship
• 2 A starting point: the historic turn
• 3 Not a history: the call for a historic turn in management and organizational studies
• 4 Paradigms and prospects in management and organizational history
• 5 Revisiting the historic turn ten years on
• References
• Index