Category: Call for Papers

4 days left to submit your EGOS short paper!

Steph

There are 4 days left to submit your EGOS short paper to SWG8!

If you have never been to EGOS – the system does not accept any late submissions, so please make sure that you have paid your EGOS membership and submitted your paper by Monday 11 January 2016!

Sub-theme 08: (SWG) History and Organization Studies: The Ways Forward

Convenors:

Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific, USA, and Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

dwadhwani@pacific.edu

Matthias Kipping, Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada

mkipping@schulich.yorku.ca

Stephanie Decker, Aston Business School, UK

s.decker@aston.ac.uk

Call for Papers

Historical sources, methods, and theoretical constructs have gained considerable attention in management and organizational studies in recent years (Üsdiken & Kipping, 2014). Researchers have mades a range of notable conceptual (Bucheli & Wadhwani, 2014; Rowlinson et al., 2014) and empirical contributions (O’Sullivan & Graham, 2010; Rowlinson et al., 2014; Kipping & Üsdiken, 2014) that have laid the foundations for a diverse array of approaches to historical research and reasoning in organization studies. Moreover leading journals, such as Organization Studies and Academy of Management Review, have supported these developments by announcing special issues devoted to historical research and theory. Indeed, one could fairly state that the nature and value of historical research has come to be more broadly understood and accepted than when the EGOS Standing Working Group (SWG) on “Historical Perspectives in Organization Studies” was formed.

In this, the final year of the SWG 08, we seek a broad range of empirical papers that explicitly build on the foundations that have been established but move the conversation between history and organization studies forward in interesting and novel ways. We also welcome innovative conceptual papers based on previous research. Some of the ways in which this might be done includes:

  • Building new bridges between history and other approaches to the study of organizations that are sensitive to time and context, such as process research, institutional theory, and evolutionary theory.
  • Extending the work that has been done on history and organization theory to related domains, including strategy and entrepreneurship.
  • Introducing new or underused methods for interpreting historical sources related to organizations and organizing.
  • Exploring novel types of historical source material.
  • Examining new and understudied historical periods or regions.
  • Considering new ways in which the past is used in organizations and organizing

Short paper submissions should not only describe the empirical research conducted and elaborate on theoretical claims, but should also explicitly engage the extant work on historical approaches to management and organization studies and point to promising new theoretical, methodological, and empirical directions.

References

  • Bucheli, M., & Wadhwani, R.D. (eds.) (2014): Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Kipping, M., & Üsdiken, B. (2014): “History in organization and management theory: more than meets the eye.” Academy of Management Annals, 8 (1), 535–588.
  • O’Sullivan, M., & Graham, M.B.W. (2010): “Moving Forward by Looking Backward: Business History and Management Studies.” Journal of Management Studies, 47 (5), 775–790.
  • Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., & Decker, S. (2013): “Strategies for organizational history: A dialogue between historical theory and organization theory.” Academy of Management Review, 39 (3), 250–274.
  • Rowlinson, M., Casey, A., Hansen, P.H., & Mills, A.J. (2014): “Narratives and Memory in Organizations.”Organization, 21 (4), 441–446.
  • Üsdiken, B., & Kipping, M. (2014): “History and organization studies: A long-term view.” In: M. Bucheli & R.D. Wadhwani (eds.): Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 33–55.
  1. Daniel Wadhwaniis Fletcher Jones Associate Professor of Management at University of the Pacific, USA, and Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research has used historical approaches to study a range of organizational issues, including the emergence of new markets, the nature of entrepreneurial agency, and the processes of categorization and value determination in organizational fields. He is co-editor (with Marcelo Bucheli) of “Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods” (Oxford University Press, 2014), which examines the role of historical research and reasoning in organization studies.

Matthias Kipping is Professor of Policy and Chair in Business History at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. His research has focused on the development and role of the different institutions of management knowledge, namely management consulting and business education. In his publications, as well as in his teaching, he has been trying to link historical research with organizational theory. He is active in a variety of scholarly associations in both business history and management and organization studies.

Stephanie Decker is Professor of Organization Studies and History at Aston Business School, UK. As a historian working at a business school, most of her work is concerned with the relation between organization theory and history. She is co-editor of ‘Business History’ and is the recipient of the prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2014–15, as well as the principal organizer of a seminar series on organizational history funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (UK). She co-authored “Research Strategies for Organizational History” (Academy of Management Review, 2014) with Michael Rowlinson and John Hassard.

To upload your short paper, please log in to the Member Area.

Reminder: EGOS submission SWG8

Steph

There are 4 days left to submit your EGOS short paper to SWG8!

If you have never been to EGOS – the system does not accept any late submissions, so please make sure that you have paid your EGOS membership and submitted your paper by Monday 11 January 2016!

Sub-theme 08: (SWG) History and Organization Studies: The Ways Forward

Convenors:
R. Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific, USA, and Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Matthias Kipping, Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada
Stephanie Decker, Aston Business School, UK

Call for Papers

Historical sources, methods, and theoretical constructs have gained considerable attention in management and organizational studies in recent years (Üsdiken & Kipping, 2014). Researchers have mades a range of notable conceptual (Bucheli & Wadhwani, 2014; Rowlinson et al., 2014) and empirical contributions (O’Sullivan & Graham, 2010; Rowlinson et al., 2014; Kipping & Üsdiken, 2014) that have laid the foundations for a diverse array of approaches to historical research and reasoning in organization studies. Moreover leading journals, such as Organization Studies and Academy of Management Review, have supported these developments by announcing special issues devoted to historical research and theory. Indeed, one could fairly state that the nature and value of historical research has come to be more broadly understood and accepted than when the EGOS Standing Working Group (SWG) on “Historical Perspectives in Organization Studies” was formed.

In this, the final year of the SWG 08, we seek a broad range of empirical papers that explicitly build on the foundations that have been established but move the conversation between history and organization studies forward in interesting and novel ways. We also welcome innovative conceptual papers based on previous research. Some of the ways in which this might be done includes:

  • Building new bridges between history and other approaches to the study of organizations that are sensitive to time and context, such as process research, institutional theory, and evolutionary theory.
  • Extending the work that has been done on history and organization theory to related domains, including strategy and entrepreneurship.
  • Introducing new or underused methods for interpreting historical sources related to organizations and organizing.
  • Exploring novel types of historical source material.
  • Examining new and understudied historical periods or regions.
  • Considering new ways in which the past is used in organizations and organizing

Short paper submissions should not only describe the empirical research conducted and elaborate on theoretical claims, but should also explicitly engage the extant work on historical approaches to management and organization studies and point to promising new theoretical, methodological, and empirical directions.

References

  • Bucheli, M., & Wadhwani, R.D. (eds.) (2014): Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Kipping, M., & Üsdiken, B. (2014): “History in organization and management theory: more than meets the eye.” Academy of Management Annals, 8 (1), 535–588.
  • O’Sullivan, M., & Graham, M.B.W. (2010): “Moving Forward by Looking Backward: Business History and Management Studies.” Journal of Management Studies, 47 (5), 775–790.
  • Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., & Decker, S. (2013): “Strategies for organizational history: A dialogue between historical theory and organization theory.” Academy of Management Review, 39 (3), 250–274.
  • Rowlinson, M., Casey, A., Hansen, P.H., & Mills, A.J. (2014): “Narratives and Memory in Organizations.”Organization, 21 (4), 441–446.
  • Üsdiken, B., & Kipping, M. (2014): “History and organization studies: A long-term view.” In: M. Bucheli & R.D. Wadhwani (eds.): Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 33–55.
R. Daniel Wadhwani is Fletcher Jones Associate Professor of Management at University of the Pacific, USA, and Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research has used historical approaches to study a range of organizational issues, including the emergence of new markets, the nature of entrepreneurial agency, and the processes of categorization and value determination in organizational fields. He is co-editor (with Marcelo Bucheli) of “Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods” (Oxford University Press, 2014), which examines the role of historical research and reasoning in organization studies.
Matthias Kipping is Professor of Policy and Chair in Business History at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. His research has focused on the development and role of the different institutions of management knowledge, namely management consulting and business education. In his publications, as well as in his teaching, he has been trying to link historical research with organizational theory. He is active in a variety of scholarly associations in both business history and management and organization studies.
Stephanie Decker is Professor of Organization Studies and History at Aston Business School, UK. As a historian working at a business school, most of her work is concerned with the relation between organization theory and history. She is co-editor of ‘Business History’ and is the recipient of the prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2014–15, as well as the principal organizer of a seminar series on organizational history funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (UK). She co-authored “Research Strategies for Organizational History” (Academy of Management Review, 2014) with Michael Rowlinson and John Hassard.
To upload your short paper, please log in to the Member Area.

 

CFP: Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship

Christina

Call For Papers

Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research

 

March 31, 2016

Embassy Suites by Hilton Downtown Portland

319 SW Pine Street, Portland, OR 97204

 

Deadline: January 22, 2016 for abstracts

In recent years, both business historians and entrepreneurship scholars have grown increasingly interested in the promise of using historical sources, methods and reasoning in entrepreneurship research. History, it has been argued, can be valuable in addressing a number of limitations in traditional approaches to studying entrepreneurship, including in accounting for contexts and institutions, in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic change, in providing multi-level perspectives on the entrepreneurial process and in situating entrepreneurial behavior and cognition within the flow of time. Support for historical research on entrepreneurship has grown, with both leading entrepreneurship researchers calling for the use of historical perspectives and with Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal announcing a call for papers for a special issue devoted to history and entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this workshop is to provide scholars with developmental feedback on work-in-progress related to historical approaches to entrepreneurship and strategy, broadly construed. Our aim is support the development of historical research on entrepreneurship for publication in leading journals, including for the special issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. In addition to providing feedback and suggestions for specific topics, the workshop will address the commonly faced challenges of writing for a double-audience of historians and entrepreneurship/management scholars, engaging entrepreneurship theory and constructs, and identifying the most valuable historical sources and methods in studying entrepreneurial phenomena. We welcome work-in-progress at all stages of development. Interested scholars may submit two types of submissions for discussion: full research papers (8,000 to 12,000 words) or paper ideas (1,000 to 3,000 words).

The workshop will take place immediately before the BHC meeting and at the same location but is managed separately. Participation in BHC meeting and workshop is possible. If you have questions or are interested in participating, please submit an initial abstract of max. 300 words and a one-page CV before Friday, January 22, 2016 to David Kirsch (dkirsch@rhsmith.umd.edu), Christina Lubinski (cl.mpp@cbs.dk) or Dan Wadhwani (dwadhwani@pacific.edu). Invitations to the PDW will be sent out before February 1, 2016. Full paper (8,000 to 12,000 words) and paper idea (1,000 to 3,000 words) submissions will be expected by Friday, March 11, 2015. Please feel free to contact the organizers with your paper ideas if you are interested in early feedback or want to inquire about the fit of your idea with this PDW.

The Broader Project

This workshop is part of a larger project that seeks to examine how analytical attention to history, context, and time may reshape theories of entrepreneurship as well as how these theories in turn allow us to re-consider how we account for agency, time and change in history. It follows on previous workshops in Copenhagen and Miami in 2014. The project seeks to develop an intellectual community comprised of both historians and entrepreneurship theorists engaged in multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research on entrepreneurial history. Some of the questions the broader project will address include:

  • What is the relationship between theories of history and theories of entrepreneurship? How have they shaped one another over time and what are the ways in which they do so today?
  • In what ways are time and context viewed in history and in entrepreneurship theory? How can more critical views of time and context contribute to our understanding of entrepreneurial behavior and the entrepreneurial process?
  • How do differences in methods matter to our understanding of entrepreneurship? Specifically, how should we think about the relationship between historians’ emphasis on deep context and narrative explanation and entrepreneurship researcher’s preference for valuing theoretical propositions from the point of view of advancing intellectual exchange between the two fields? What should we make of the tension between the theoretical inclination to gain insight through abstraction and the historical inclination to gain insight through contextualization? In what ways can the tension be productive or useful?
  • How does “history” or “the past” manifest itself in the entrepreneurial process? Is it constraining or enabling, and if “it depends,” then on what conditions does it depend? How is history “used” in the entrepreneurial process?
  • What is the relationship between narrative and history within the entrepreneurial process?
  • Can historical contextualization of the current moment (1970s-present) in entrepreneurship thought and practice help shed light on the present?
  • Can a deeper engagement with entrepreneurship theory allow us to understand the past in new ways and produce new history?

Individual and institutional support

The workshop and broader project is an initiative of the Copenhagen Business School’s Centre for Business History and Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy in collaboration with scholars and institutions throughout Europe and North America. We are grateful for financial support from the Entrepreneurship Platform and the Rethinking History in Business Schools Initiative at CBS.

CfP Globalisation in Business History

Steph

Special Issue Call for Papers: “Globalisation in Business History”

International Journal of Business and Globalisation

Guest Editor: Christopher M. Hartt, Dalhousie University, chris.hartt@dal.ca

Special Issue Description:

The Special Issue will focus on historical themes related to globalisation and business.  Business History is an inclusive discipline welcoming all fields, methods and perspectives, of enquiry related to management, entrepreneurism, economics, accounting, psychology, sociology, law or any other business related discipline as well as those from history.

The theme of the special issue relates to the growing debates related to current globalizing activities and the relationship between those debates and the historical context.  What has happened in the contested past? How is that relevant for the present and future? How do themes of competitiveness, profitability, and long-term sustainability interact with ethics, social responsibility and environmentalism in a global market? Have these themes emerged before and how did they impact trade?

The questions in the forgoing paragraph provide a small sample of appropriate submissions and should not constrain researchers.  Any manner of thought provoking and rigorous article engaging globalization and Business History is encouraged.

Please upload to http://www.inderscience.com/jhome.php?jcode=ijbg and keep your submission number for future reference.

Deadline for submissions: 31 July 2016

You can expect reviewer comments by 31 October

Revisions due 31 December for publication shortly thereafter

Selected References:

Anderson, Alistair R. “Conceptualising Entrepreneurship as Economic’explanation’and the Consequent Loss Of’understanding’.” International Journal of Business and Globalisation 14, no. 2 (2015): 145-57.

Ankersmit, F. R. “Historiography and Postmodernism.” In The Postmodern History Reader, edited by Keith Jenkins. London: Routledge, 1997.

Dunning, John H. The Globalization of Business (Routledge Revivals): The Challenge of the 1990s. Routledge, 2014.

Durepos, G., A.J. Mills, and J. Helms Mills. “Tales in the Manufacture of Knowledge: Writing a Business History of Pan American Airways.” Management & Organizational History 3, no. 1 (2008): 63-80.

Galanis, Mr Michael, and Mr Alan Dignam. The Globalization of Corporate Governance. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2013.

Gallhofer, Sonja, Jim Haslam, and Sibylle van der Walt. “Accountability and Transparency in Relation to Human Rights: A Critical Perspective Reflecting Upon Accounting, Corporate Responsibility and Ways Forward in the Context of Globalisation.” Critical Perspectives on Accounting 22, no. 8 (2011): 765-80.

Hartt, C., A.J. Mills, J.  Helms Mills, and L. Corrigan. “Sense-Making and Actor Networks: The Non-Corporeal Actant and the Making of an Air Canada History.” Management & Organizational History 9, no. 3 (2014/07/03 2014): 288-304.

Hartt, C., A.J. Mills, J. Helms Mills, and G. Durepos. “Markets, Organizations, Institutions and National Identity: Pan American Airways, Postcoloniality and Latin America.” Critical Perspectives on International Business 8, no. 1 (2012): 14-36.

Hopkins, Anthony G. Globalisation in World History. Random House, 2011.

Jenkins, K. Refiguring History. New Thoughts on an Old Discipline.  London: Routledge, 2003.

Pukall, Thilo J, and Andrea Calabrò. “The Internationalization of Family Firms a Critical Review and Integrative Model.” Family Business Review 27, no. 2 (2014): 103-25.

Rivera, Isaías R. “Global Age Cosmopolitanism.” International Journal of Business and Globalisation 9, no. 1 (2012): 90-105.

Rowlinson, M. . “Public History Review Essay: Cadbury World.” Labour History Review 67, no. 1 (2002): 101-19.

Suddaby, Roy, William M Foster, and Albert J Mills. “Historical Institutionalism.” Organizations in time: History, theory, methods  (2014): 100-23.

 

 

 

Beyond the Managerial Utopia of American Schools of Business Administration: Early Emergence of European Management Education in the 18th and 19th centuries

Dan

Call for Papers

The 2016 Association pour l’Histoire du Management et des Organisations Conference will hold a special track on the “Emergence of European Management Education in the 18th and 19th centuries.” This special track invites new thinking and empirical findings on 18th and 19th century European management education that both supplement present history and facilitate broader analysis of the interplay with the now dominant US model. In line with the main scientific orientation of the 21st AHMO conference, contributions could, for instance, investigate two main issues:

1) Could 18th-19th century European management education have offered a managerial utopia alternative to the American model?

2) How was early European management education institutionalized? Were there gaps between the ideals presented and the institutionalisation process in practice?

The full call for papers can be found here: http://ahmo.hypotheses.org/1122

Contributors are expected to submit their papers to the co-organizers: lise.arena@unice.fr, thomas.durand@cnam.fr and jcspender@gmail.com by January 5th, 2016 and will be notified of acceptance by January 15th, 2016.

The track will be held on March 18th during the 21st JHMO at UTBM Sevenans (Territoire de Belfort), FRANCE.

 

The Association pour l’Histoire du Management et des Organisations is a French research community that gathers researchers in management, organisations studies, history, sociology and economics. The annual AHMO “Journées” aim to facilitate discussion and to stimulate pluridisciplinary collaborations on the history of management and organizations. The aim of the association is also to promote the integration of history in teaching curricula and to help Ph.D. students for early careers developments.

CfP: Applied microhistory: A workshop

Steph

Applied microhistory: A workshop.

 Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Tuesday, 15 March 2016.

As time puts things into perspective, the heated and sometimes misleading historiographical debates of the 1970s and 1980s on micro-history and its focus on small subjects seem to fade away. Yet in the meantime historical micro-analysis has emerged as a useful method to approach a very diverse set of questions in different fields of social sciences and humanities.

Micro-analysis focuses on the reduction of scale as an instrument to answer theoretical general questions, maintaining a dynamic tension between ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ perspectives. In so doing, it offers a logical procedure to infer general considerations from specific cases, regardless of their statistical representativeness. At the same time, this approach implies a contingent view of the relationship between agency and structure, highlighting the creativity of the former and the complexity of the latter.

This workshop aims at discussing the contribution of micro-analytical historical approaches to research in different fields, from the most classical focus on local communities to the challenge of studying at micro level global connections and institutions, as well at the organizational level. Contributors are invited to address the methodological issues implied in the use of a micro-analytical approach with reference to a diverse range of research fields.

Scholars interested in participating should send a title and short abstract of their proposed contribution by January 15 to Giovanni Favero (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia) – gfavero@unive.it

References:

Decker, Stephanie (2015) Mothership reconnection: Microhistory and institutional work compared. In T.G Weatherbee, P.G. McLaren, & A.J. Mills (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Management and Organizational History (pp. 222-237). London: Routledge. https://goo.gl/hBJD7A

Fellman, Susanna & Rahikainen, Marjatta (Eds.) (2012) Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. http://goo.gl/znojt0

Magnússon, Sigurour G. & Szijártó, Istvan M. (2013) What is Microhistory? Theory and Methods. London: Routledge. https://goo.gl/G9yzYa

Trivellato, Francesca (2011). Is there a future for Italian microhistory in the age of global history? California Italian Studies Journal, 2(1). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq

 

 

Deadline for EGOS SWG8: The future of organizational history

Steph

Sub-theme 08: (SWG) History and Organization Studies: The Ways Forward

Back to list | Program
To upload your short paper, please log in to the Member Area.
  • Please upload by:  Monday, January 11, 2016, 23:59:59 CET
Convenors:
R. Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific, USA, and Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Matthias Kipping, Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada
Stephanie Decker, Aston Business School, UK

Call for Papers

Historical sources, methods, and theoretical constructs have gained considerable attention in management and organizational studies in recent years (Üsdiken & Kipping, 2014). Researchers have mades a range of notable conceptual (Bucheli & Wadhwani, 2014; Rowlinson et al., 2014) and empirical contributions (O’Sullivan & Graham, 2010; Rowlinson et al., 2014; Kipping & Üsdiken, 2014) that have laid the foundations for a diverse array of approaches to historical research and reasoning in organization studies. Moreover leading journals, such as Organization Studies and Academy of Management Review, have supported these developments by announcing special issues devoted to historical research and theory. Indeed, one could fairly state that the nature and value of historical research has come to be more broadly understood and accepted than when the EGOS Standing Working Group (SWG) on “Historical Perspectives in Organization Studies” was formed.

In this, the final year of the SWG 08, we seek a broad range of empirical papers that explicitly build on the foundations that have been established but move the conversation between history and organization studies forward in interesting and novel ways. We also welcome innovative conceptual papers based on previous research. Some of the ways in which this might be done includes:

  • Building new bridges between history and other approaches to the study of organizations that are sensitive to time and context, such as process research, institutional theory, and evolutionary theory.
  • Extending the work that has been done on history and organization theory to related domains, including strategy and entrepreneurship.
  • Introducing new or underused methods for interpreting historical sources related to organizations and organizing.
  • Exploring novel types of historical source material.
  • Examining new and understudied historical periods or regions.
  • Considering new ways in which the past is used in organizations and organizing

Short paper submissions should not only describe the empirical research conducted and elaborate on theoretical claims, but should also explicitly engage the extant work on historical approaches to management and organization studies and point to promising new theoretical, methodological, and empirical directions.

References

  • Bucheli, M., & Wadhwani, R.D. (eds.) (2014): Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Kipping, M., & Üsdiken, B. (2014): “History in organization and management theory: more than meets the eye.” Academy of Management Annals, 8 (1), 535–588.
  • O’Sullivan, M., & Graham, M.B.W. (2010): “Moving Forward by Looking Backward: Business History and Management Studies.” Journal of Management Studies, 47 (5), 775–790.
  • Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., & Decker, S. (2013): “Strategies for organizational history: A dialogue between historical theory and organization theory.” Academy of Management Review, 39 (3), 250–274.
  • Rowlinson, M., Casey, A., Hansen, P.H., & Mills, A.J. (2014): “Narratives and Memory in Organizations.”Organization, 21 (4), 441–446.
  • Üsdiken, B., & Kipping, M. (2014): “History and organization studies: A long-term view.” In: M. Bucheli & R.D. Wadhwani (eds.): Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 33–55.
R. Daniel Wadhwani is Fletcher Jones Associate Professor of Management at University of the Pacific, USA, and Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research has used historical approaches to study a range of organizational issues, including the emergence of new markets, the nature of entrepreneurial agency, and the processes of categorization and value determination in organizational fields. He is co-editor (with Marcelo Bucheli) of “Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods” (Oxford University Press, 2014), which examines the role of historical research and reasoning in organization studies.
Matthias Kipping is Professor of Policy and Chair in Business History at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. His research has focused on the development and role of the different institutions of management knowledge, namely management consulting and business education. In his publications, as well as in his teaching, he has been trying to link historical research with organizational theory. He is active in a variety of scholarly associations in both business history and management and organization studies.
Stephanie Decker is Professor of Organization Studies and History at Aston Business School, UK. As a historian working at a business school, most of her work is concerned with the relation between organization theory and history. She is co-editor of ‘Business History’ and is the recipient of the prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2014–15, as well as the principal organizer of a seminar series on organizational history funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (UK). She co-authored “Research Strategies for Organizational History” (Academy of Management Review, 2014) with Michael Rowlinson and John Hassard.
To upload your short paper, please log in to the Member Area.

CfP Historical Research on Institutional Change, due 31 March 2016

Steph1 Comment

Business History Special Issue

Historical Research on Institutional Change

 Manuscripts should be submitted at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/fbsh before 31 March 2016.

Guest editors

Stephanie Decker, Aston University, UK, s.decker@aston.ac.uk
Lars Engwall, Uppsala University, Sweden, lars.engwall@fek.uu.se
Michael Rowlinson, Queen Mary University, London, m.rowlinson@qmul.ac.uk
Behlül Üsdiken, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey, behlul@sabanciuniv.edu

Call for papers

The important role that institutions play for all forms of organizations has been recognized in a wide variety of disciplines. Douglass North’s (1990) book on the nature of institutional change in economic history was influential in both economics and history. Likewise has among others the article by DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) been significant in sociology and organization studies. Nevertheless, the nature of institutional change has remained a heavily contested subject that has not seen the same degree of theoretical and empirical development.

Institutional change is by its very definition a process that unfolds over long time periods with fundamentally unpredictable outcomes that can only be properly evaluated with hindsight. Because institutional change is a fundamental feature in historical research, many historians do not necessarily define or reflect on this as a research phenomenon in its own right. On the other hand many research debates in organization studies have remained curiously a-historical when developing the antecedents, outcomes and mediating factors for processes of institutionalization, institutional maintenance, and deinstitutionalization (Dacin, Munir and Tracey, 2010).

Nevertheless, between these two extremes there are many processes of institutional change in organizations that develop over time periods that are too long to research with the standard methods of qualitative social science such as interviews or participant observations. Here some historical approaches based on archival research may create more interesting research designs (Wright and Zammuto, 2013). Historical theory also has different insights to offer organization studies (Rowlinson, Hassard and Decker, 2014). It is in these areas that management and organizational history could contribute by investigating phenomena from a more long-term perspective. Suddaby, Foster and Mills (2014) have similarly argued for a more historical institutionalism to address unresolved issues in institutional theory, such as the paradox of embedded agency.

Within business and organizational history, there is an increasing interest in questions of theory and methodology. Alternative approaches, not just those drawn from the social sciences, but also from historiography, such as oral history or microhistory, offer new ways of approaching research. Historians interpret institutional theory in different ways from organization scholars (Rowlinson and Hassard, 2013), which offers new avenues for interdisciplinary dialogue.

Submissions may address the following issues and questions, although this list is not exclusive:

  • The five C’s of historical thinking (change over time, context, contingency, causality and complexity) and the possibilities of institutional theory (Andrews and Burke, 2007).
  • New institutional theory in organizational sociology has lost the focus of old institutionalism on issues of politics and power. Would historical institutionalism offer a useful corrective?
  • Alternative methodologies for historical institutionalism: oral history, microhistory, ANTi-history.
  • Institutional transplants beyond legal and economic history.
  • Institutional entrepreneurs and institutional work – the return of historical actors and contingent decision-making.
  • Institutional logics or politically-motivated ideologies: old wine in new bottles?
  • Routines, practices and process vs. the eventful temporality of history.
  • Beyond path dependency in explaining long-term structural change in historical perspective.

We hope to attract papers with a long-term perspective focusing on institutions, organizations as well as on organizational fields. We envisage that papers will be empirically rich but also they are linked to current institutional theories. In addition we shall also consider theoretically or methodologically oriented contributions provided they address both historical and institutional theory concerns.

About the guest editors

Stephanie Decker is Professor of Organization Studies and History at Aston Business School, UK. As a historian working at a business school, most of her work is concerned with the relation between organization theory and history. She is co-editor of ‘Business History’ and is the recipient of the prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2014-15, as well as the principal organizer of a seminar series on organizational history funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (UK). She co-authored “Research Strategies for Organizational History” (Academy of Management Review, 2014) with Michael Rowlinson and John Hassard.

Lars Engwall is Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at Uppsala University. His research has been directed towards the development of industries and organizations as well as the creation and diffusion of management knowledge. Among his publications related to the sub-theme can be mentioned Mercury Meets Minerva (2009/1992), Management Consulting (2002, ed. with Matthias Kipping), The Expansion of Management Knowledge (2002, ed. with Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson), and Reconfiguring Knowledge Production (2010 with Richard Whitley and Jochen Gläser).

Michael Rowlinson is Professor of Management and Organizational History in the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London. He has published widely on the relationship between history and organization theory in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Business History, Human Relations, Organization, and Organization Studies. His research on corporate history concerns the representation of history by organizations, especially the dark side of their involvement in war, slavery, and racism. This has been published in journals such as Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Journal of Organizational Change Management, and Labour History Review. His current interests include the methodology of interpretive historical research in organization studies. He edited the Journal Management & Organizational History from 2008 to 2013 and he is now a Senior Editor for Organization Studies and a co-editor for the Special Topic Forum of the Academy of Management Review on ‘History and Organization Studies: Toward a Creative Synthesis.’

Behlül Üsdiken is Professor of Management and Organization at Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey. Previously, he was a professor at Bogazici University. He has contributed to numerous journals as well as a variety of edited collections. He has served as a Co-editor of Organization Studies in 1996–2001 and a Section Editor of the Journal of Management Inquiry in 2007–2012. His current research focuses upon family business groups, management education and universities.

References

Andrews, T. and Burke, F. (2007). What Does It Mean to Think Historically? Perspectives on History 45, 1: 32-35.

Dacin, M.T., Munir, K. and Tracey, P. (2010) Formal Dining at Cambridge colleges: Linking ritual performance and institutional maintenance. Academy of Management Journal 53, 6: 1393-1418.

DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W. W. (1983) The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review 48,2: 147-160.

North, D.C. (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowlinson, M. and Hassard, J. (2013). Historical Neo-institutionalism or Neo-institutionalist Jistory? Historical Research in Management and Organization Studies. Management & Organizational History 8, 2: 111-126.

Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., and Decker, S. (2014). Research Strategies for Organizational History: A Dialogue between Historical Theory and Organization Theory. Academy of Management Review 39,3: 205-274.

Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M., and Mills, A. J. (2014). Historical Institutionalism. Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Ed. By M. Bucheli and R. D. Wadhwani. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 100-123.

Wright, A. L. and Zammuto, R. F. (2013). Wielding the Willow: Processes of Institutional change in Englısh County Cricket. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 308–330.

CfP EGOS 2017 sub-theme proposals

Steph

This week the call for sub-theme proposals for the 33rd EGOS Colloquium, in Copenhagen, Denmark, in July 2017 went out. The Standing Working Group 8, launched by Behlul Usdiken, Matthias Kipping and Lars Engwall, still has one more year to go, but EGOS 2016 in Naples will be its last year. Hence for EGOS 2017 at Copenhagen Business School there will be no standard track for organizational history anymore. But there is the opportunity to submit a proposal for a stand-alone sub-theme on a related subject. The deadline for submission is Wednesday, November 25, 2015 (23:59:59 CET), and proposals can be submitted at any time before that.

To view the Call for sub-theme proposals, please go to the EGOS “2017 Copenhagen” website: http://egosnet.org/jart/prj3/egos/main.jart?content-id=1442567999319&rel=de&reserve-mode=active

Please ensure that you also read the “Guidelines and criteria for sub-theme proposals for EGOS Colloquia”: http://egosnet.org/jart/prj3/egos/data/uploads/General%20EGOS%20descriptions/EGOS-Colloquia_Guidelines_SUB-THEME-submission-2017.pdf

CfP: Joint ABH/GUG 2016 conference

Steph

The next annual conference of the Association of Business Historians (UK) will take place jointly with the German Gesellschaft fur Unternehmensgeschichte on 27-28 May 2016 at the University of Humboldt, Berlin, Germany.

For further information please see either GUG website:  http://www.unternehmensgeschichte.de/

Or check out the ABH website for updated details:  http://www.gla.ac.uk/external/ABH/

Please see the general call for papers: Call for Papers 2016.

The Coleman Prize for the best thesis in business history call: Call for Papers Coleman Prize 2016.

And last but not least the call for the Slaven doctoral workshop that precedes the main conference: Call for Papers Slaven 2016.