New OHN Audio Article: Rethinking the role of planning and materiality – the case of London Business School. By Matthew Hollow.

January 11, 2023January 11, 2023 Steph

Do you want one of your articles available as an audio version? Send us a message at Orghist.com! The article needs to be OA and formatted as a word document designed to be read out. Get in touch for more information.

This week, we are making another audio version of an Open Access article available as a podcast.

Rethinking the role of planning and materiality in the Americanization of management education: The case of London Business School

By Matthew Hollow.

Published in Business History, currently advance online.

Abstract

In recent years, much has been written about the so-called ‘Americanization’ of management education in Europe in the post-1945 era. One area that has relatively little attention in this literature, however, is the impact that material and spatial factors had on efforts to import US models of management education overseas. This study begins to redress this issue by focussing in-depth on the challenges involved in the design, planning, and construction of the physical spaces of the London Business School — one of the most prominent advocates of the US model of management education in this period. In the process, it contributes to the literature on Americanization, as well as our understanding of the history of business schools, by illustrating how the historical trajectories of such institutions can be influenced and shaped by external actors, material constraints, and other contingent factors related to the planning and building of a business school.

New OHN podcast article: Enron and the California energy crisis

December 13, 2022December 13, 2022 Steph

This week, we are making another audio version of an Open Access article available as a podcast.

Enron and the California energy crisis: the role of networks in enabling organizational corruption.

Adam Nix.
Stephanie Decker.
Carola Wolf.

Published in Business History Review, 2021, volume 95, issue 4.

Abstract.

We provide an analytically structured history of Enron’s involvement in the California energy crisis. In doing so, our analysis explores Enron’s emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an inter-organizational network to manipulate California’s energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization, is often highly dependent on the support of other organizations. Specifically, we show how Enron combined resources from partner firms with their own capabilities, manipulating the energy market and capitalizing on the crisis. From a methodological point of view, our study also emphasizes the growing importance of digital sources for historical research, drawing particularly on telephone and email records from the period to develop a rich, fly-on-the-wall understanding of an otherwise hard-to-observe phenomenon.

Keywords: Organizational corruption; Organizational misconduct; Analytically structured history; Digital sources; Energy supply industry.

New Audio Article – Whiskey and Dynamic Capabilities

November 23, 2022November 23, 2022 Steph

Do you want one of your articles available as an audio version? Send out a message at Orghist.com! The article needs to be OA and formatted as a word document designed to be read out. Get in touch for more information.

This week, we are making another audio version of an Open Access article available as a podcast. This article appeared in “Business History” advance online in June 2022.

Unlocking Dynamic Capabilities in the Scotch Whisky Industry, 1945 to present

By Niall G MacKenzie, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow.

Andrew Perchard, Northumbria University.

David Mackay, Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde.

George Burt, Stirling Management School, University of Stirling.

Abstract

In this article we examine the development of the Scotch whisky industry since 1945 through the lens of dynamic capabilities. We explain how sui generis acts – novel initiatives outwith the established repertoire of practices of a firm or industry – by external actors joining the industry helped unlock dynamic capabilities at the firm level in the industry which in turn drove change across the sector after a series of takeovers. We detail the key structural changes in the Scotch whisky industry and demonstrate how important external actors can be in effecting sector level change by extending and connecting our analysis to existing debates in business history and strategy research.

https://anchor.fm/orghist/embed/episodes/3–Whiskey-and-Dynamic-Capabilities–by-Mackenzie-et-al—Business-History–2022-e1r6kdg

Want to listen to academic articles in a podcast format?

November 9, 2022 Steph

We are running this as a trial to see if having academic articles available as podcast (where the text is just being read out by an automatically generated voice) is a helpful format. Maybe when you are stuck in traffic, or on a really crowded train/bus, or training for a marathon, or your eyes just hurt too much to read another academic article – who knows! Maybe you are more audial then visual in your learning style? Whatever the reason, we’d love some feedback from you if this a good format for OHN, and if so, what kind of content we should make available as podcasts. You can post comments below this blog.

Audio version of the Journal of World Business article:

Introducing the eventful temporality of historical research into international business

By Stephanie Decker

Abstract

Historical research represents an alternative understanding of temporality that can contribute to greater methodological and theoretical plurality in international business (IB) research. Historians focus on the importance of events within their historical context and structure their accounts through periodisation, assume that the temporal distance between the past and present determines the temporal positionality of researchers, and seek to reconstruct past events through historical sources, which require critical interpretation. Historical research provides an alternative methodological approach to temporality, context, and distance with relevance to a range of IB theories.

Keywords:

History – Temporality – Event – Temporal distance – Interpretation

Note:

The whole article is available as a podcast. Check out our new podcast channel, also named Organizational History Network, on Anchor, Spotify and Apple Podcast, for some different types of content:

https://anchor.fm/orgh

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/organizational-history-network/id1652219372