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Management and Organizational History A Research Overview

1st Edition Albert J. Mills

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Management of Organizational Culture as a Stabilizer of

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A Guide to Research Methodology-An Overview of Research
Problems, Tasks and Methods 1st Edition Shyama Prasad
Mukherjee (Author)

A Guide To Research Methodology: An Overview Of Research

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‘Reflecting deeply on recent historical approaches to management and
organization studies, the authors have provided a uniquely reflexive
account of the different histories, conceptions of histories and authors
involved in recent scholarship that has sought to bring history back into
focus in a largely ahistorical and instrumental field. The book will be a
significant guide for those researchers seeking to disentangle the differ-
ent approaches to histories involved in recent research, alerting them to
the grounds and assumptions underlying various contributions.’
—Stewart Clegg, Distinguished Professor of Management and
­Organization Studies at the University of Technology
Sydney, Australia

‘There are no scholars better placed to explore the development of man-

agement and organization history studies than Albert Mills and Milo-
rad Novicevic. They have made enormous contributions to the debates
that have nourished this fascinating field of study over the years. In this
book they chart an exciting and ambitious course for its future.’
—Todd Bridgman and Stephen Cummings, authors of A New
History of Management

‘This well-written and thought-provoking publication addresses its

central topics as no book before and is a must read for those interested
on management and organizations.’
—Rafael Alcadipani, EAESP-FGV, Brazil

‘History needs to be taken seriously in management and organization

research, and Mills and Novicevic do just that. The books offers a
thought-provoking critical analysis of the reasons and consequences of
the ahistorical orientation in management and organization r­ esearch.
By so doing, this book adds to the recent historical turn and helps us
to go deeper and further than what we typically think organization or
management history is all about.’
—Eero Vaara, Professor of Organization and Management at
Aalto University, Finland

‘This book provides deep insights on positivist and postmodernist his-

toriography and demonstrates the role of historians in the authorship
of history production in management and organization.’
—Gagan Deep Sharma, University School of
Management Studies, India
Management and
Organizational History

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 in-
tellectual 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 histo-
riography, such as ANTi-History, revisionist history, counter-­h istory,
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.

Albert J. Mills is a Professor of Management at Saint Mary’s Uni-

versity (Canada) and Professor of Innovation Management at the
University of Eastern Finland. He is also the co-editor of the journal
Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management.

Milorad M. Novicevic (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is a former Chair

of the Academy of Management – History Division and an ­Associate
Professor at the University of Mississippi.
State of the Art in Business Research
Edited by Professor Geoffrey Wood

Recent advances in theory, methods and applied knowledge (alongside

structural changes in the global economic ecosystem) have presented
researchers with challenges in seeking to stay abreast of their fields
and navigate new scholarly terrains.
State of the Art in Business Research presents short-form books
which provide an expert map to guide readers through new and rap-
idly evolving areas of research. Each title will provide an overview of
the area, a guide to the key literature, and theories and time-saving
summaries of how theory interacts with practice.
As a collection, these books provide a library of theoretical and
conceptual insights, and exposure to novel research tools and applied
knowledge, that aid and facilitate in defining the state of the art, as a
foundation stone for a new generation of research.

Network Industries
A Research Overview
Matthias Finger

Strategic Risk Management

A Research Overview
Torben Juul Andersen and Johanna Sax

Management and Organizational History

A Research Overview
Albert J. Mills and Milorad M. Novicevic

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.

com/State-of-the-Art-in-Business-Research/book-series/START
Management and
Organizational History
A Research Overview

Albert J. Mills and Milorad

M. Novicevic
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Albert J. Mills and Milorad M. Novicevic
The right of Albert J. Mills and Milorad M. Novicevic to be identified
as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 9781138485891 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781351047920 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
This book is dedicated to Kaylee Dean, my Great
Granddaughter, who brings a future to my past and
Kristin Williams, my friend and PhD student, who
continually reminds me of the central importance of
gender to knowledge of the past.
(Albert J. Mills)

This book is dedicated to Daniel Wren and Art Bedeian,

the iconic management historians, who pointed to me the
intellectual gravity point from which I could decenter my
critical sensemaking of the management’s past.
(Milorad M. Novicevic)
Contents

1 History and authorship 1

2 A starting point: the historic turn 18

3 Not a history: the call for a historic turn in

management and organizational studies 26

4 Paradigms and prospects in management and

organizational history 52

5 Revisiting the historic turn ten years on 59

References 89
Index 109
1 History and authorship

Introduction
This book explores key scholarly debates around the inclusion of his-
torical 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 atheoret-
ical 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 concep-
tualize 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 be-
come 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 struc-
tured 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 or-
ganizational theory.
In our first chapter, we raise some of the underlying aspects of the
production of history. We begin by problematizing the relationship of
2 History and authorship
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 histor-
ical accounts and use this discussion to explain and segue into our
particular starting point of “the historic turn,” around which we intro-
duce 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 devel-
opment 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 communi-
ties of practice and the production of historical accounts in manage-
ment 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 Uni-
versity in Canada. That much is obvious. Less obvious, hidden in fact,
 History and authorship 3
is the potential influence of our former and current experiences on how
we have come to understand history, the past, management, and or-
ganizational 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 power-
ful influence on how we have come to view the world. We have related
to people and events over our separate lifetimes through our embodi-
ment. 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 over-
view of historians’ engagement with gender. Also pivotal is the
work of Joan W. Scott (2007), who discusses history-writing as cri-
tique 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 post-
colonial thinking addressing the legacy of colonialism. In par-
ticular, 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
4 History and authorship
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 ac-
counts that goes far beyond attempts to reflect on the influence of self
on historical facts. As we shall discuss throughout the book, author-
ship 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 his-
torical account. Many “factual” (Rowlinson, 2004) historians would
nowadays agree that historical facts are given meaning through a narra-
tive 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 his-
torian 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.
 History and authorship 5
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 con-
struct 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 hu-
man 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 histo-
rian 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 ques-
tion 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 histo-
rian 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 postmodern-
ist all of the time. Like every historian, the postmodernist
must conduct empirical research, establishing that events
6 History and authorship
occurred and the order of them, checking sources that ver-
ify the facts of the case, and making decisions of judgement
(balance of probabilities may be the best term) where abso-
lute certainty is not possible.

Brown’s account – although contentious in several ways (do post-

modernist 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 mul-
titude of people, things, and ideas that go into the m ­ aking of his-
torical 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 admin-
istrations 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 W ­ ashington), the i­ nnumerable
artefacts (e.g., bridges, roads, airports) that were constructed by
the Roosevelt Administration (Taylor, 2008), various archival col-
lections (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), nar-
rated (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 corrobo-
rated 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, expla-
nation 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 devas-
tating for history of a particular kind” (i.e., the work of modernist
 History and authorship 7
historians). This leads him to conclude that “historians have to re-
think their foundationalist and absolutist dependency on the pre-
cepts 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 privi-
leged position, with the implicit purpose of ruling over other kinds
of histories” (p. x). Kalela (2012, p. 53) goes on to state that his “sug-
gestion 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 histo-
rians 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
­h istory itself – see Hartt, 2013) – influence, shape, and produce history.

The historian in context

Before we move on, we will unpack the role of the historian a little
further. So far, we have critiqued the view that past events and people
are largely narrated as history by the historian; as well as that history
narrative is ultimately the outcome of the diligent work of the histo-
rian. This critique was never meant to imply that the historian makes
the narrative up but, rather, that through his or her training, certain
people and events in the past are brought to light through the histori-
an’s skills in uncovering, recovering, or discovering certain events and
people, as well as through the historian’s writing abilities.
It is the association between certain people and events in the past,
the historian, and the historical account that makes the historian’s
work so powerful and tends to conflate history with the historian’s
account of “it.” It is this association, according to Kalela (2012), that
has served to privilege disciplinary historical accounts over other
8 History and authorship
accounts and other kinds of history. From a modernist perspective,5
other kinds of history – what Munslow (2010, p. 3) calls “history of a
particular kind” – are usually viewed as somehow lessor in value due
to the relative or complete lack of methodological training of the au-
thor (Kalela, 2012). Or it may be due to the lack of objectivity assessed
through source criticism that the (not-professionally trained) author
brings to the study of specific past events and/or people (Munslow,
2010). For example, from this perspective, detective novelist Robert
Daley’s (1980) history of Pan American Airways (Pan Am) was com-
missioned as a corporate history, whose narrative focused on the he-
roic role of airline president Juan Trippe. As such, it could be argued
to have lost sight of objectivity. Similarly, left-wing journalist ­Matthew
Josephson’s (1943) account of Pan Am could be discounted for not be-
ing a “real” history because it set out to reveal the misuse of corporate
power. This is what Kalela (2012, p. x) is referring to when he contends
that this type of objectivist approach ignores “the purposes and social
functions of non-academic histories.” In the process, socially impor-
tant and insightful stories can be ignored and devalued.
The espoused objectivist aspect of the professional training of his-
torians has led to the work of certain other historians (e.g., feminists
and Marxists) being discounted because of their activist or critical ap-
proaches (Lemisch, 1975; Zinn, 1997).

History beyond the historian

The discussion above points to, at the very least, an oblique recog-
nition that history is actually made by a number of people and other
(non-human and abstract or non-corporeal) actors (Callon, 1986;
­Latour, 2005)6: more likely than not a large number of actors. The
actors may include the historian but not necessarily; where historians
are included, they are not necessarily central to the process.

History in translation
As we have seen above, even selected postmodernist historians –
Brown (2005) and Munslow (2010), for example – also overly focus
on the role of the historian. In fairness, this is, arguably, for three
very powerful reasons. First, and the most obvious, is the division
of academia into disciplines and the requirement and expectation
that academics engage with other academics that will review their
work particularly within their own discipline. Second, historians, as
noted above, are a powerful group in terms of deciding what history
is and who is a legitimate historian. Thus, it makes considerable
 History and authorship 9
sense to attempt to influence how this powerful group (and espe-
cially future generations of historians) come to rethink their role
in history. Third, if we are to accept the idea of history as discur-
sive (Jenkins, 1991; Munslow, 2010), then it makes sense to address
concerns/provide insights to key human actors (historians) who are
supposedly well positioned to change aspects of the discourse.
However, to return to the work of Kalela (2012), the disciplinary
history is but one important kind of history. The other two are
public and popular histories. So, this means that other accounts
of history and the past are being “written”7 outside of academia
and by individuals, groups, and communities of people that may
or may not involve historians and written historical accounts. In
recent years, this has led to the study and production of histo-
ries through exploration of networks of actors (Durepos & Mills,
2012a, 2012b).
An early version of this approach is that of Durepos, Mills and
Helms Mills (2008) who, drawing in part on ANT, sought to un-
derstand how a particular history of Pan Am – An American Saga.
Juan Trippe and his Pan Am Empire (Daley, 1980) – came to be
written and what we can learn from the process. Using various ar-
chived documents,8 Durepos and her colleagues were able to trace
the production of Daley’s history through a series of documented
discussions between leading Pan Am Executives (including Com-
pany President Juan Trippe, Vice President John Leslie, and com-
pany advisor Charles Lindbergh).
These documents revealed a wealth of discussions on the need
for a history of the airline, the kind of history it should be, and
who should be principally involved in the development and writ-
ing of the history. Specific actors involved included Wolfgang
­Langewiesche, who was initially employed to write the history;
a large number of transcripts of interviews that Langewiesche
conducted with various company employees; in-house newslet-
ters that produced numerous historical accounts of the airline; a
number of historical accounts drafted by John Leslie; and, in this
case, the archive itself where most of these documents and other
artefacts were housed.

Behind closed doors: working in the archives

An archive is arguably a very powerful influence on how historical
accounts are written – at least in terms of the professional historian’s
account. That influence can result from the way how “the archive” is
10 History and authorship
defined and understood (Moore, Salter, Stanley, & Tamboukou, 2017);
the epistemological stance of the researcher (Mills & Helms Mills,
2017, 2018); the specific purposes and audiences that the materials
were collected for (Yin, 2009); the underlying socio-political ­pressures
behind the establishment of a particular archive (Burton, 2005a);
any given archive’s “forms of classification, ordering and exclusions”
(Ghosh, 2005, p. 28); the discursive character of the times in which
the archive was established, and points at which collections are made
and at which those collections are being read (Moore et al., 2017); and
the extent to which the researcher-archive relationship is caught up in
“archive fever” (Derrida, 1995), i.e., psychoanalytical power and iden-
tity work (Fritzsche, 2005).9 This list of potential venues of influence
on the production of history is far from comprehensive. These venues
are the areas of concern which has generated book-length accounts,
see, for example, Burton (2005b) and Moore et al. (2017). Let’s briefly
review each of the areas of concern we have mentioned above.

Definitional issues
An archive is often defined as a collection of documents and artefacts
(Stan, 2010) that are usually housed in a physical location and ded-
icated to any number of specific people (e.g., Franklin D. Roosevelt
Library and Museum), events (e.g., The Imperial War Museum), or-
ganizations (e.g., the British Airways Heritage Collection), commu-
nities (e.g., the Museum of Humanity), and institutions of national
interest (e.g., the Library and Archives Canada and the U.S. National
Archives and Records Administration). This type of archives has been
referred to as the “canonical version that tends to dominate, the state
archive version associated with a disciplining view of what archives
and archival research ‘ought’ to be like” (Moore et al., 2017, p. 2). Yet,
as Moore et al. (2017, p. 1) contend, an “archive is a repository of some
kind [which can be housed in a building], cardboard-box, photograph
album, internet website, or discourse of interconnected ideas such as
community heritage and shared memory.” How each of these types of
archive is accessed and viewed can, arguably, influence the legitimacy
of the historical nature of the account, perhaps, encouraging some re-
searchers of the past10 to avoid the non-canonical forms of archive.11

Epistemological stances of the researcher of the past

The influence of the archive on the researcher is not simply a di-
rect one-way street. It involves a relationship that is mediated by the
 History and authorship 11
epistemological stance of the researcher. Mills and Helms Mills (2017)
differentiate between positivist and postpositivist stances of research-
ers towards the archive. They contend that the positivist stance is a
view of archives “as ‘an empirical data corpus’ . . . of artifacts and
documents that are more-or-less associated with a physical location or
“archive”; while a postpositivist stance towards the archive refers to “a
set of rules, which at a given period and for a definite society, structure
the conditions in and through which knowledge is produced” (Mills &
Helms Mills, 2017, p. 96). Rules in this case are sets of practices and
expectations (e.g., male only hiring practices based on underlying pre-
sumptions about respective male and female abilities), “whose very
form and regularities ‘govern one’s manner of perceiving, judging, im-
agining, and acting’” (Flynn, 1996, cited in Mills & Helms Mills, p. 96).
While both positivist and postpositivist researchers of the past rec-
ognize bias inherent in archival research, the former group is p ­ rimarily
concerned with limitations to objectivity (Elton, 2002; Scott, 1990), the
latter group is primarily concerned with recognition of the ­influence
of subjectivism. For the positivist researcher,

most historical research will therefore involve a detailed critical

discussion of the sources utilized in the enquiry in order to ascer-
tain the authenticity, reliability, representativeness, appropriate-
ness and comprehensiveness of the body of sources utilized in the
enquiry.
(L’Estrange, 2014, p. 137)

For the postpositivist, on the other hand, “‘the archive has neither sta-
tus or power without an architectural dimension’ – that is, a material
presence which structures access, imposes its own meanings on the
evidence contained therein, and watches over users both literally and
figuratively” (Burton, 2005b, p. 9). Further, “archival work is an em-
bodied experience, one shaped as much by national identity, gender,
race, and class as by professional training” (Burton, 2005b, p. 9).

Purposes and audiences

From a positivist perspective, Yin (2009, p. 106) warns us that while
archives are valuable sources of evidence, the materials they include
need to be treated with caution because they were collected with
specific purposes and audiences in mind. For example, the British
Airways heritage collection originally involved the collection of doc-
uments and materials that could be used to provide an ongoing social
12 History and authorship
history of the airline. It was started by former airline employees in the
1980s and served to keep alive the memory of those who had served
the airline over its lifetime (Coller, Helms Mills, & Mills, 2016). The
audience was, largely, former employees and long-service employees.
It would be two decades before the company took a particular interest
in the collection, providing limited space to the volunteers involved.
Following the subsequent provision of temporary space (in old British
Airways’ buildings), the collection took on the character of an archive,
where employees and researchers could access given materials. The
character of the materials changed dramatically in the late 2000s when
the company – seeing a corporate advantage in the collection and fo-
cusing on the public as its primary audience – moved the archive to its
headquarters to serve mostly as a staff museum and collection of mar-
keting materials (Coller et al., 2016). In this way, the socio-politics of
the company’s archive collection changed. The microhistorian Carlo
Ginzburg refers to a different but equally important aspect of the rela-
tionship of audience to history. Reflecting on his most famous work –
The Cheese and the Worms (1976) – Ginzburg was later to state that
“the book was published, it was a great success, and then is was taken
over by its readers, who have used it for their own purposes.” Then, he
adds: “Strange though it may seem, I was wholly unprepared for that.
It was particularly ironic, as the book is a study of precisely the same
process – Menocchio’s own adoption of others’ writings, the reader’s
power over the text” (Ginzburg, quoted in Gundersen, 2003, p. 7).

Socio-political pressures
The British Airways case thus provides an example of the socio-­politics
of archive collections – illustrating how they can change their intended
character over time. Burton (2005a, p. 6) sums it up thus:

archives do not simply arrive or emerge fully formed, nor are they
innocent of struggles for power in either their creation or their
interpretive applications. . . . [They] come into being in and as
history as a result of specific political, cultural and socioeconomic
pressures.

One particular area of socio-politics involved the choice of which

airline’s materials to collect – British Airways, formed in 1974 from
the merger of the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and
­British European Airways (BEA); BOAC, formed from a 1939 merger
of Imperial Airways Ltd. (IAL) and British Airways Ltd. (BAL); BEA,
 History and authorship 13
formed out of BOAC in 1946; IAL’s predecessor airlines formed in
­1919–1922 and merged in 1924; or all of the 57 airlines officially as-
sociated with today’s British Airways. The latter choice, established
through a series of in-house histories over time, influenced the choice
of archival materials as well as the history of the company: for exam-
ple, the museum is arranged from a series of artefacts that start with a
painting of the “airline’s first” flight in 1919 and moving relatively seam-
lessly through 57 successor airlines through to today (Mills, 2002).

Ordering and exclusions

Drawing on Foucauldian theory, ordering refers to a series of conscious
and unconscious decisions on what constitutes legitimate evidentiary
traces of the past. These decisions become embedded in the processes
and structuring of archives – what Burton (2005b, p. 9) ­refers to as the
“architectural dimension” and Gosh (2005, p. 28) ­conceptualizes as
“the logic of the archive”; it is

a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even

creative invention – processes set in motion by, among other
things, one’s personal encounter with the archive, the history of
the archive itself and the pressure of the contemporary moment
on one’s reading of what is to be found there.
(2005a, p. 8)

The latter touches on the link between ordering and discursivity. The
power of ordering is summed up by “Foucault’s dictum that history
transforms documents into monuments” (Moore et al., 2017, p. 11) and
Derrida’s view of the archive “as power as reinforced by the valori-
zation of inscription” (Moore et al., 2017, p. 7). Part of the ordering
process involves decisions on what is to be included and what is to be
excluded.12 The British Airways Museum, for example, focuses largely
on men and machines, privileging pilots, managers, and engineers.
Social history, discriminatory practices, and women’s role in the
­development of commercial aviation are largely absent, thus reflecting
the socio-politics of the archive.13

Discourses, archives, and archive fever

Postmodern researchers of the past focus on discursivity, arguing
that history is a meta-discourse (Jenkins, 1991; Munslow, 2010) that
encourages a deep-rooted belief in, and need for, making accounts of
14 History and authorship
the past. The story of the making of Pan Am’s history (Durepos et al.,
2008) is one of many examples, with senior managers and employees
striving to have a history of the company written, and the company
eventually spending close to a million dollars in current value to have
it written (Durepos et al., 2008). From this perspective, part of a dom-
inant discourse in a given era (or “episteme”) includes the archive,
both as a collection of documents in a physical location and as a set
of “interconnected ideas” embedded in established practices (Moore
et al., 2017, p. 1). In this view, Pan Am’s history illustrates how archi-
val research “is rooted in specific ways of writing and reading the ma-
terial actualities of an archive and its contents and the resultant ways
of shaping the what and the how of these activities” (Moore et al.,
2017, p. 9). Yet, the very idea of discursivity means that historians
and archivists are not simply disciplined in their discoveries but also
interact, and, in the process, change discourses over time. In such
cases, archival material is subject to “the pressure of the contem-
porary moment on one’s reading” (Burton, 2005a, p. 8). Indeed, as
Moore et al. (2017, p. 3) contend, “the contents of all archives are al-
ways read and understood within the present moment.” Therefore, it
is ­conceivable that the “archive contains primary sources at the same
time it is ­always a secondary trace of historical discourse” (Moore
et al., 2017, p. 11).

History in translation
Despite the ongoing debate on the appropriate epistemological
stance to history in recent years, a considerable number of scholars
in the area of management and organizational history (MOH) have
retained their adherence to the so-called “canonical” versions of
the archive (Moore et al., 2017, p. 2). Indeed, one can detect some-
thing of a privileging sense of, what is commonly referred to as,
“working in the archives.” Those who are identified with c­ anonical
archive work include Michael (Mick) ­Rowlinson – ­Cadbury (1988,
1995); John Hassard – Hawthorne Studies (2012); Alan ­McKinlay –
Bank of Scotland (McKinlay, 2013); Bill Cooke – the Tavistock In-
stitute (Cooke, 2009) and World Bank (Cooke, 2004); Trish Genoe
McLaren – Ford Foundation; G ­ abrielle ­Durepos – Pan American
Airways (Durepos & Mills, 2012b); Adam Rostis – the Red Cross
(Rostis, 2015); Albert J. Mills, Jean Helms Mills and colleagues –
British Airways (Coller et al., 2016; Mills, 1995), Air Canada
(Hartt, Mills, Helms Mills, & Corrigan, 2014), Qantas (Shaffner,
Mills, & Helms Mills, 2017) and Pan American Airways (Hartt,
Mills, Helms Mills, & Durepos, 2012).
 History and authorship 15
Going beyond the canon and recognizing the move towards
socio-materiality in MOS, Mills and Helms Mills (2018) have re-
cently introduced an amodernist (Latour, 1993) approach to archi-
val research, which refers to the study of relational links between a
range of human, non-human and abstract or non-corporeal actors
in the production of knowledge of the past: “With this approach
the focus is not so much on developing histories out of available
archival materials but rather on analysis of how specific histo-
ries come to be developed,” and the implications involved in this
co-production of history (A. J. Mills & Helms Mills, 2018, p. 36).
While amodernist accounts of the production of (extant) knowl-
edge have been around for almost four decades (see, for example,
Callon & Latour, 1981) accounts of “knowledge of the past” are re-
cent developments. these developments were initiated by the work
of Durepos et al. (2008) who contend that networks of human, mate-
rial, and abstract actors strongly influence whether a history comes
to be written and how a decision to write a history influences what
eventually is produced as history. For example, there was some re-
sistance to a history of Pan Am by Juan Trippe who was concerned
that he could be negatively portrayed, as he had been in an earlier
leftist history written by Josephson (1944). The eventual outcome
was the production of a new history of the airline that is something
akin to a corporate history in which Juan Trippe is favorably por-
trayed as an aviation pioneer and visionary (Durepos et al., 2008).
Other MOS histories that draw on analysis of actor-networks
will be discussed in greater depth in the forthcoming chapters of
this book, and include Shenhav and Weitz’s (2000) use of “con-
structivist actor-network theory” (p. 375) to make sense of uncer-
tainty in Organization Theory through analyses of “primary data
collected from the American Machinist and the Engineering
­Magazine” (p. 373); Bruce and Nyland’s (2011) study that draws on
­“Callon and Latour’s sociology of ‘translation’” (p. 383) to reveal
how the Human Relations School wrongly became characterized
as a progressive approach to management and organization stud-
ies; Myrick, Helms Mills and Mills’ (2012) study of how the cur-
rent history of the Academy of Management came to be written,
and Novicevic, Marshall, Humphreys and Seifried’s (2018) study
that used a “combined ANTi-History/Micro-historical method”
to examine James Meredith’s leadership during the racial inte-
gration of higher education in the United States during the early
1960’s “which reveals how social endorsement of Meredith’s lead-
ership was accompanied by social contestation.”
16 History and authorship
To summarize, in this chapter we set out to explore various insights
into the role of authorship in the production of knowledge of the past.
Discussion ranged from the centrality of the historian and his/her
professional training, cognitive abilities, and epistemological stance
through to the recently decentred notion of the historian as a network
of human, non-human, and non-corporeal actors. As we shall demon-
strate in subsequent chapters, all these debates loom large in recent
developments associated with the historic turn in MOS.

Notes
1 This section, which is repeated at points throughout the book, is written
with the intent to uncover and to discuss at some length things that we
have raised in the body of the text that are usually in the background of
some debates. Feminism, for example, rarely appears in debates about a
historic turn in MOS but needs to be foregrounded.
2 This characterization is, in itself, contentious and shaped, among other
things by the typology that Rowlinson constructs. Like Gibson Burrell’s
and Gareth Morgan’s (1979) four paradigms of sociological and organiza-
tional thought, once you have boxes of typologies to fill you are apt to try
to squeeze theorists into them. In the case of Kieser, it can be argued that
he doesn’t fit neatly into the factualist historian category and could well
be located somewhere between the factual and the narrative classification.
For example, at some point in his outline he rejects the characterization
of historians as “myopic fact-collectors without a method” (Kieser, 1994,
p. 612). Nonetheless, he does not go further in addressing those critical
issues.
3 There is considerable debate around the character of Hayden White’s ap-
proach to history. Some have claimed his work as structuralist and oth-
ers as poststructuralist (Jenkins, 1995). As such, in the latter case, White
could also fit in Rowlinson’s “archaeo-genealogical” approach.
4 After this point, unless otherwise stated, we will simply refer to “the pro-
fessionally trained historian” as the historian.
5 In the extant literature the terms “modernist and positivist” are often
conflated. While arguably a detailed case can be made for keeping the
two terms separate (Johnson & Duberley, 2000), we are using the terms
interchangeably. Munslow (2010, p. 3) goes a stage further, referring to
“history of a particular kind.” Similarly, in debate around postmodernism
and poststructuralism some authors make a considerable effort to differ-
entiate the two (Prasad, 2018), while others view them as interchangeable
(Bowden, 2018). Again, we take the latter approach.
6 While Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has not adequately dealt
with history and the past it does provide interesting insights into how they
might be studied – see Durepos and Mills (2012a) who draw on those in-
sights, along with poststructuralist historiography and the sociology of
knowledge, to develop an approach that they call ANTi-History.
7 This is meant metaphorically. Some popular historical accounts, for exam-
ple, may involve a primarily oral tradition where accounts are passed from
 History and authorship 17
people to people over time (Sarsby, 1988) and/or are eventually written up
through the collection of oral accounts (Ellis & McCutcheon, 1996). Other
popular accounts may develop through movies – D.W. ­Griffith’s movie
Birth of a Nation (1915), for example, is said to have influenced the devel-
opment of the Ku Klux Klan through its racialized imagery and emplot-
ment. See White (2015).
8 Largely from the Pan American World Airways Collection at the Otto
Richter Library of the University of Miami.
9 For an interesting book on how national histories are developed, see
­Furtado (2018).
10 We use this term to avoid the notion that historians are the only people to
do archival research.
11 Often time these choices can have interesting and profound outcomes.
For example, former Red Cross worker Adam Rostis pursued study of
the ­Biafran War (1968–1971) in the archives of the Museum of the Inter-
national Red Cross in Geneva. While he had access to a number of doc-
uments from that era, he discovered that the archives pertaining to the
role of the Red Cross in the Biafran War were not available to the public.
Rostis, who identifies his epistemological stance as postcolonial, moved
beyond the Red Cross archives to undertake an intensive media search
on the War and managed to uncover a wealth of material in the process –
concluding that humanitarian organizations, such as the Red Cross, are
disciplinary institutions “that dominate and regulate populations through
disciplines” (p. 136).
12 See, for example, Gosh (2005) and Decker (2013) on colonial exclusionary
practices.
13 In the current BA Museum at the airline’s headquarters, the main depic-
tion of female employees is a series of female mannequins dressed in dif-
ferent flight attendants’ uniforms. A rare but cursory recognition of the
neglect, if not total exclusion, of women is offered by Paul Jarvis – the
curator of the collection – whose only comment in his illustrated history
of the airline is to say: Following the advent of commercial airlines in
Britain “women would not even achieve full voting rights until 1928 and
it would take several more decades and another world war before women
could begin to take an active part in the operational side of civil aviation”
(Jarvis, 2014, p. 30).
2 A starting point
The historic turn

We have chosen to start our exploration of current debates in manage-

ment and organization history (MOH) with the story of the call for an
“historic turn” in management and organization studies (MOS). We
do so because much of what has been said in recent debates around
this issue provides an outline for understanding different approaches
to the past; history; and the related methodological, epistemologi-
cal, and ontological issues involved in the study of management and
organization. We have also chosen this approach to reveal how the
historic turn engendered the arguments about the role of narratives
(White, 1973, 1987), starting points (Jenkins, 1991), networks (Myrick,
Helms Mills, & Mills, 2013), and politics (Zinn, 1990) in the produc-
tion of history.
To begin with the argument about narratives, Hayden White (1973)
contends that it is not facts that shape a historical account but the
way those facts are pulled together as a story. White argues that, con-
trary to common parlance, “facts do not talk for themselves.” From
an almost unending number of phenomena, some are selected by the
historian1 to constitute the facts of the story and then, through their
selection and ordering, those phenomena – constituted as facts – shape
the narrative to be told. Along the way, the particular selection of phe-
nomena is often shaped through a political process, a particular focus,
and a starting point. To take histories of Pan American Airways (Pan
Am), for example, Daley’s (1980) An American Saga: Juan Trippe and
his Pan Am Empire involved a narrative that revolved around the role
of airline president Juan Trippe and how he was a “pioneer” of the
development and rise of commercial aviation. This set up the starting
point of the book with a focus on the life of Juan Trippe: “At the begin-
ning Trippe was both a dreamer and a dare-devil, a youth with mind
and heart literally in the clouds [. . .]” (Daley, 1980, p. 6). This was a
commissioned history funded by Pan Am and with the approval of
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