Category: General

PhD & Post-Doc event: Crisis, Resilience & Risk

Steph

The Centre for Business History in Scotland (CBHS), at the University of Glasgow are holding a three-day event aimed at PhD students and early career Post-Docs on 26-28 August 2019.  The event is being organised by CBHS, Glasgow, with assistance from the department of Modern History at the University of Tuebingen, Germany.  The theme of the Summer School is, “Business beyond the Business Cycle:  Crises, Resilience and Risk Management, c.1850-2000.

Please circulate the attached Call for Papers to any PhD students or Post Docs you think might be interested in presenting a paper at the Summer School.  The deadline for applications is Monday, 10 June 2019.

Also, if you wish to attend and/or participate, please email the organisers, Dr Christopher Miller, Christopher.Miller@glasgow.ac.uk or Dr Daniel Menning, Daniel.Menning@uni-tuebingen.de.

 

Reblogged from the ever brilliant Patter

Steph

Reblogged from Pat Thomson’s brilliant blog ‘Patter’:

revise and resubmit

Yep. Those dreaded words when you get the email back from the journal. R and R. Anything but Rest and Relaxation. Groan. In essence, the message says We have considered your paper and we have decided that – well it’s just not going to cut it. At this point. However, we see enough in it to give you another shot. But only one. And (to steal Ru Paul’s words) Don’t **** it up.

To continue reading click here.

CHRONOS – launch of new research centre

Steph

It’s with great pleasure that we announce the forthcoming launch of the Centre for Critical and Historical Research on Organization and Society (CHRONOS) is delighted to announce its official launch on 15 May 2019, Moore Auditorium, Royal Holloway.

For more information please email elena.giovannoni@rhul.ac.uk

FT on organizational memory

Steph

Managers are the guardians of company history

Institutional memory is valuable and without it we risk repeating past mistakes

Years ago, my parents decided to build a summerhouse in the garden and consulted a neighbour who had once been the property’s housekeeper. The octogenarian sucked her remaining teeth. “Mark my words: it will blow down. The last one did,” she said. “It stood for 50 years — but it blew down.”

This is the problem with tapping institutional memory. Some of your colleagues are the only people who know about the organisation’s strategic errors and successes. But like all autobiography, their recollections may be partial, and their instincts may tend to preservation rather than progress.

I was reminded of the summerhouse (still standing, by the way), when I read last week’s interview with Konica Minolta’s chief executive. Shoei Yamana found section heads, known as “bucho”, resisted his reforms. Their attachment to the status quo was founded on the group’s historical victories, but, as Mr Yamana put it, “We cannot live with past success”.

Sweep away this layer of middle management, as new brooms are wont to do, and you will quickly hear the complaint that the organisation is losing institutional memory. This is invariably self-interested. Still, a little like taking a mallet to a retaining wall, it is best to understand what you are removing before you tear it out. Otherwise, you will find yourself in the position of those new chief executives who axe a group of old hands only to have to rehire them as “consultants” because they were the only people who knew how to fix an old piece of kit, read a defunct computer language, or even (in the case of the worldwide pilot shortage) fly a plane.

For the whole article, see the FT  .

 

MOH accepted into the SSCI

petermiskell1 Comment

I’m delighted to announce that the journal Management and Organizational History has been accepted for inclusion in the Social Sciences Citation Index.
The journal is indexed from Volume 12, Issue 1 (2017), so we expect to see it receive its first official impact factor score in 2020.
While journal impact factors provide only a crude measure of journal quality, these types of metrics are becoming increasingly important in influencing where scholars choose to publish their work. Inclusion in the SSCI is therefore a welcome indication of the esteem in which the journal is held, as well as being good news for the wider discipline of business and organizational history.

Peter Miskell (on behalf of the Editorial Team at MOH)

History and the Micro-foundations of Dynamic Capabilities

Steph

Reblogged from the Past Speaks:

andrewdsmith's avatarThe Past Speaks

janus_coin The Roman god Janus faced both forward and backward in time. In addition to being the god of time, he was also associated with gateways and doors.

Presentation: 20 February, 15:30 and 16:30 at University of Liverpool Management School Seminar Room 4

“History and the Micro-foundations of Dynamic Capabilities” by Roy Suddaby, University of Victoria.
Abstract. The capacity to manage history is an important but undertheorized component of dynamic capabilities. Following Teece (2007), we observe that the micro-foundations of strategic action, particularly in rapidly changing environments, are premised on the ability of the firm to enact change by sensing opportunity in the future, seizing that opportunity in the present and reconfigure organizations by overcoming the historical constraints of their past. To accomplish this, firms must acquire a historical consciousness – an awareness of history as an objective, interpretive and imaginative cognitive skill. In order to fully exploit dynamic capabilities, firms must acquire the ability to manage…

View original post 69 more words

Perceiving the Present by Means of the Past: Theorizing the Strategic Importance of Corporate Archives

Steph

Reblogged from The Past Speaks:

andrewdsmith's avatarThe Past Speaks

AS: I’m pleased to announce the publication of a new book chapter.

Wim van Lent  and Andrew D. Smith , (2019), Perceiving the Present by Means of the Past: Theorizing the Strategic Importance of Corporate Archives, in Torben Juul Andersen , Simon Torp , Stefan Linder (ed.) Strategic Responsiveness and Adaptive Organizations: New Research Frontiers in International Strategic Management (Emerald Studies in Global Strategic Responsiveness, Volume ) , pp.97 – 110

Abstract

It is commonly acknowledged that history matters in strategy. However, the strategy literature mainly discusses history in terms of path dependency, leaving little room for managerial agency, despite growing anecdotal evidence that managers can actively draw on corporate history to improve decision-making. An emerging literature on how managers use the past to give sense to internal and external stakeholders has given rise to a more agent-based approach to history, but while sense-giving is commonly connected to sense-making as a driver of strategic change, the role of…

View original post 68 more words

Updated bibliography on methodology for organization history

Steph

Historical Methods in Management and Organizational Research:
A Bibliography
January 2019

 

Balmer, J. M. T., & Burghausen, M. (2015). Explicating corporate heritage, corporate heritage brands and organisational heritage. Journal of Brand Management, 22(5), pp. 364–384.

Brunninge, O. (2009). Using history in organizations, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 22 (1), pp. 8 – 26.

Burghausen, M., & Balmer, J. M. T. (2015). Corporate heritage identity stewardship: A corporate marketing perspective, European Journal of Marketing, 49(1), pp. 22-61.

Cannadine, D. (2002). What is History Now? Houndsmill and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Carr, E. H. (1961). What is History?. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Coraiola, D., Foster, W. M., & Suddaby, R. (2015). Varieties of History in Organizational Studies. In P. McLaren & A. J. Mills (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Management and Organizational History. London: Routledge, pp. 206-221.

Decker, S. (2013). The silence of the archives: Business history, post-colonialism and archival ethnography. Management & Organizational History, 8(2), pp.155-173.

Decker, S. (2015). Mothership reconnection: Microhistory and institutional work compared. In T. Weatherbee, A. J. Mills, & P. G. McLaren (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Management and Organizational History. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 222–237.

Dobson, M., & Ziemann, B. (2009). Reading Primary Sources: The interpretation of texts from nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Durepos, G. and Mills, A.J. (2012). Actor-network theory, ANTi-history and critical organizational historiography. Organization, 19(6), pp.703-721.

Fellman, S., & Rahikainen, M. (2012). Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Forbes, D. P., and Kirsch, D. A. (2011). The study of emerging industries: Recognizing and responding to some central problems. Journal of Business Venturing 26(5), pp. 589-602.

Foster, W. M., Suddaby, R., Minkus, A., & Wiebe, E. (2011). History as social memory assets: The example of tim hortons, Management & Organizational History, 6(1), pp. 101-120.

Gill, M. J., Gill, D. J., & Roulet, T. J. (2018). Constructing Trustworthy Historical Narratives: Criteria, Principles and Techniques. British Journal of Management, 29(1), 191-205.

Godfrey, P.C., Hassard, J., OConnor, E.S., Rowlinson, M. and Ruef, M. (2016). What is organizational history? Toward a creative synthesis of history and organization studies. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), pp.590-608.

Green, A., & Troup, K. (1999). The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-century History and Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Jenkins, K., & Munslow, A. (2003). Re-thinking history. Routledge classics. London: Routledge.

Jordanova, L. (2006). History in Practice. London: Bloomsbury.

Kipping, M., Wadhwani, R. D., & Bucheli, M. (2014). Analyzing and Interpreting Historical Sources: A Basic Methodology. In M. Bucheli & R. D. Wadhwani (Eds.), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 305-329.

Kirk, N. (1994), History, language, ideas and post-modernism: a materialist view, Social History, 19(2), pp. 221-240.

Lipartito, K. (2014). Historical Sources and Data. In M. Bucheli & R. D. Wadhwani (Eds.), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 284–304.

Maclean, M., Harvey, C. and Clegg, S.R. (2016). Conceptualizing historical organization studies. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), pp.609-632.

Maclean, M., Harvey, C. and Clegg, S.R., 2017. Organization Theory in Business and Management History: Present Status and Future Prospects. Business History Review, 91(4), pp. 457-481.

McKinley, A. (2002). Dead Selves: The Birth of the Modern Career, Organization, 9(4), pp. 595-614.

Munslow, A. (1997). Deconstructing history. London: Routledge.

Perks, R., & Thomson, A. (2016). The oral history reader. Abingdon: Routledge.

Rowlinson, M. (2004). Historical Analysis of Company Documents. In C. Cassell & G. Symon (Eds.), Essential guide to qualitative methods in organizational research. London: Sage, pp. 301–311.

Rowlinson, M. & Hassard, J. (1993). The Invention of a corporate cultures: A history of the histories of Cadbury, Human Relations, 46(3), pp. 296-326.

Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., & Decker, S. (2014). Research Strategies for Organizational History: A Dialogue Between Historical Theory and Organization Theory, Academy of Management Review, 39(3), pp. 250-274.

Schultz, M. & Hernes, T. (2013). A Temporal Perspective on Organizational Identity, Organization Science, 24 (1), pp. 1–21.

Scott, J.W. (1991). The Evidence of Experience, Critical Inquiry, 17(Summer), pp. 773-97.

Spiegel, G.B (ed.) (2005). Practicing History New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn. Routledge, London.

Stedman Jones, G. (1996). The deterministic fix: some obstacles to the further development of the linguistic approach to history in the 1990s, History Workshop Journal, 42, pp. 19-35.

Stutz, C. and Sachs, S. (2018). Facing the Normative Challenges: The Potential of Reflexive Historical Research. Business & Society, 57(1), pp. 98-130.

Taylor, S., Bell, E. and Cooke, B. (2009). Business history and the historiographical operation. Management & Organizational History, 4(2), pp. 151-166.

Vaara, E. and Lamberg, J.A. (2016). Taking historical embeddedness seriously: Three historical approaches to advance strategy process and practice research. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), pp. 633-657.

Vernon, J. (1994). Whos afraid of the linguistic turn? The politics of social history and its discontents. Social History, 19(1), pp. 81-97.

Wadhwani, R.D. and Decker, S. (2017). Clios Toolkit: The Practice of Historical Methods in Organization Studies. In Sanjay Jain and Raza Mir (eds.) Routledge Companion to Qualitative Research in Organization Studies New York: Taylor and Francis, pp. 113-127.

Wadhwani, R. D. (2016). Historical methods for contextualizing entrepreneurship research. In F. Welter & W. B. Gartner (Eds.), A research agenda for entrepreneurship and context. Cheltenham & Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, pp. 134–145.

Yates, J. (2014). Understanding Historical Methods in Organization Studies. In M. Bucheli & R. D. Wadhwani (Eds.), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 265–283.

Zammito, J. (1993), Are we being theoretical yet? The new historicism, the new philosophy of history and practising historians. The Journal of Modern History, 65(4), pp. 783-814.

Some Christmas reading

Steph

Before we take a break for the holidays, I thought I share some potential Christmas reading with you. I am proud to announce that Business History published advance online a new Perspectives Article that I had the pleasure to edit:

History in corporate social responsibility: Reviewing and setting an agenda
Christian Stutz
Pages: 1-30 | DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2018.1543661

 

This piece reviews and evaluates both the research on history by CSR scholars, and the historical research on CSR issues (mostly by business historians) and draws a number of important issues. Its a great piece and it makes some important observations about the future opportunities for research in the field.

Here is the abstract:

The integration of historical reasoning and corporate social responsibility (CSR) theorising has recently received remarkable cross-disciplinary attention by business historians and CSR scholars. But has there been a meaningful interdisciplinary conversation? Motivated by this question that presumes significant limitations in the current integration, I survey existing research for the purpose of sketching and shaping historical CSR studies, ie an umbrella that brings together diverse approaches to history and CSR theorising. Drawing from the recent efforts to establish historical methodologies in organisation studies, I first reconcile discrepant disciplinary and field-level traditions to create a meaningful intellectual space for both camps. Secondly, I provide a synthesis of the history of CSR from three different meta-theoretical perspectives in the context of three maturing knowledge clusters. To bridge past and future work, I finally set a research agenda arising from current research and drawing on different sets of assumptions about history and CSR.

Happy holidays and see you bright and fresh in the New Year!
Stephanie