Tag: management history

Method & Madness – New Special Issue Out!

Steph

On September 22, 2022, the BHC held its second annual mid-year meeting. The theme of the virtual event was “Method and Madness: Historical Interpretation in a New Age of Extremes.” One-hundred, twenty-six people participated, 41 percent of whom were emerging scholars and 55 percent of whom were based outside the United States. 

We are pleased to announce the publication of a collection of peer-reviewed essays based on the conference. The essays all touch of the value of play and playfulness in research methods – especially during historical moments of uncertainty and transformation. They are grouped into four themes: new sources of play, seeing anew, sensing new connections, and entertaining new representations. A list of the essays can be found below and they are all freely available until September and can be found here. 

Sincerely,

Dan

Methods of Musement

Practice of playAuthorsEssay title 
IntroductionWadhwani, SorensenMethods of Musement
  New Sources for PlayKirsch, Decker, Nix, Girish Jain & Kuppili Venkata. Using Born-Digital Archives for Business History: EMCODIST and the Case of E-Mail
Zeng & TaoSocial Media as a source
BlackNoticing Material Culture
 Seeing AnewBallor, Recio & VanattaSurveillance Archive: Using Reports in Business History
VanAccount Books as Social Technologies
   Sensing New ConnectionsHisano & KubeEngaging with Experiences: The Senses as Lenses in Business History
Rinaldi, Salvaj, Pak & HalginDatabases, Network Analysis and Business History
 Villamor, Prieto-Nañez & Kirsch The Promise Of Machine-Learning- Driven Text Analysis Techniques For Historical Research: Topic Modeling And Word Embedding.
Entertaining New RepresentationsStaley & AssmusenModels, Objects and Ghosts: Visualizing History
Wilson & TilbaBusiness History and the ‘Practical Turn’

MOH SI on Microhistory

Steph

Management & Organizational History 

Special Issue Call for Papers 

Microhistory in Management History and Organization Theory 

Guest Editors 

  • Liv Egholm, Copenhagen Business School, le.bhl@cbs.dk 
  • Michael Heller, Brunel Business School, Michael.Heller@brunel.ac.uk 
  • Michael Rowlinson, University of Exeter Business School, m.c.rowlinson@exeter.ac.uk 

Submission September 1st, 2023 

There has been a resurgence of interest in microhistory. The classic texts associated with the subject remain immensely popular: The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzburg, 1992[1976]); The Return of Martin Guerre (Zemon Davis, 1983); and The Great Cat Massacre (Darnton, 1984). These provide a reference point, which has provided the basis for increasing reflection on the theoretical significance and methodological distinctiveness of microhistory (Magnússon & Szijártó, 2013), such as the special issue of Past and Present on ‘Global History and Microhistory’ (Ghobrial, 2019). Attention has also been paid to microhistory from management and business history as well as organization studies (Bourguignon & Floquet, 2019; Decker, 2015). Lately a recent article in Academy of Management Review has suggested that microhistory can help management and organization scholars paying attention to events and actions whose consequences unfold over years, challenging existing “macro” theories of continuity and change (Hargadon & Wadhwani, 2022). 2 

Microhistory offers an opportunity to reconceptualise relationships which lie at the heart of historical research and historiography: the historical nexus between the particular and the general, agency and structure, the micro and the macro. Microhistorians are known for their methodological habit of reading sources forensically in their search for historical clues. It implies reading historical sources ‘against the grain’ (Decker & McKinlay, 2020, pp. 26-27), or as Levi (2019: 41) puts it, ‘beyond the edge of the page’, carefully looking for what Ginzburg refers to as “unintended evidence” (Ginzburg, 2016). The use of microhistory as a magnifying glass can be seen as the equivalent of a detective’s tool. Sherlock Holmes´ working methods are often used as a metaphor for microhistory’s careful readings and detection of clues (Ginzburg, 2013 (1979)), often within “exceptional normal” cases (Grendi, 1977). 

For this reason, the trademark of microhistorical methodology is to trace sources and clues throughout and across archives (Ginzburg, 2013). The names of actors, places, concepts, events, or objects are used as concrete entry points to show how previously unrelated spaces, temporalities, and fields are woven together in practice. This mapping demonstrates great potential in revealing unnoticed relations between, for example, family life and entrepreneurship (Popp & Holt, 2013), religious practices and trade (Trivellato, 2019), or philanthropic gift giving and the establishment of the welfare state (Egholm, 2021). 

The purpose is not to argue for the universal value of the exceptional; it is to show, rather, how discrete historical events challenge our conceptualisations of the universal, and provide essential clues to what can be considered as normal (Ginzburg, 1979; Peltonen, 2001). Accordingly, the reduction of scale is not the study of the “microness” of a phenomenon (Levi, 2019, p. 38). The reduction of scale, rather, provides the historian with a heuristic tool to craft new theories by distorting or amending metanarratives and reformulating historical concepts and relations (see also Hargadon & Wadhwani, 2022). Without explicitly mentioning microhistory, a series of organizational phenomena have been reconceptualized 3 

from a close reading of sources, with notable examples being the career (McKinlay, 2002), and entrepreneurship (Popp & Holt, 2013. Thus, microhistory shows how, “history is a discipline of general questions and ‘local’ answers” (Levi, 2019, p. 45). 

The historic turn (Rowlinson, Hassard, & Decker, 2014) has pushed for a revised understanding of past context as offering more than simply temporal variables for universal theorising (Van Lent & Durepos, 2019). Historical phenomena often remain, however, reduced to consequences or affectations of particular contexts. In contrast, microhistory calls out for a grounding and explanation of the past through analyses of how actors, places, concepts, events or objects interact and are woven together in contradictory and often different fields and interests. In so doing, microhistory exposes how both individuals and social structures of all kinds are produced simultaneously through relationships and processes. It offers the possibility to situate studies of the dual temporality of individual and collective action within a longitudinal study of continuity and change over time (Hargadon & Wadhwani, 2022, p.). 

This special issue´s scope is to explore the methodological, ontological, and empirical strengths of microhistory to advance management history and organization studies. Therefore, we invite both theoretical, and theoretically informed empirical submissions that will further the contribution of microhistory in business history, management, and organizational history, as well as management and organization theory. 

Questions and topics of interest for the special issue may include: 

1. How does the use of microhistory question, elaborate, or develop macro theories or broader conceptualisations from within the confines of discrete and particular historical studies? 

4 

2. How do microhistorical methodologies of reading “beyond the edges of the paper” contradict and undermine broader historical narratives in business and management and organizational history such as Marxism, functionalism, institutionalism, neo-liberalism, the resource-based view of the firm, and economic path dependency? 

3. What are the advantages and concerns for the use of historical archival research, source criticism, triangulation, and historical interpretivism when innovative microhistorical methodologies work with “dissonant sources” and “unintended evidence”? 

4. What is the impact of microhistory in relation to archival ethnography and the employment of micro historical sources (e.g., letters, diaries, postcards, travel accounts, scrapbooks, and memoirs)? 

5. What is the way in which local knowledge and local environment historically create organizational, business, and entrepreneurial opportunities? 

6. How does a microhistorical approach reconceptualise the relationship between agency and structure in business and management and organizational history? 

7. What is the relationship between the different scales of history? In particular, to what extent do microhistories develop historical accounts that reflect on a granular scale broader organizational and business historical environments and trends? 

8. How can we account for generalisation by using a microhistorical approach? How can local answers reply to general questions by showing complex and often ambiguous connections in historical archives? 

References 

Bourguignon, R., & Floquet, M. (2019). When union strategy meets business strategy: The union voucher at Axa. Business History, 61(2), 260-280. 5 

Darnton, R. (1984). The great cat massacre and other episodes in French cultural history. New York: Basic Books. 

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

Decker, S., & McKinlay, A. (2020). Archival Ethnography. In R. Mir & A.-L. Fayard (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Anthropology and Business New York and London: Routledge. 

Egholm, L. (2021). Practising the Common Good: Philanthropic Practices in Twentieth-Century Denmark. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. 

Ghobrial, J.-P. A. (2019). Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian*. Past & Present, 242(Supplement_14), 1-22. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtz046 

Ginzburg, C. (1979). Clues. Renewal and Critique in Social Theory, 7(3), 273-288. 

Ginzburg, C. (1992[1976]). The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteeenth-Century Miller (J. Tedeschi & A. Tedeschi, Trans.). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. 

Ginzburg, C. (2013 (1979)). Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Grendi, E. (1977). Microanalisi e storia sociale. Quaderni storici, 35(maj- august). 

Hargadon, A.B. & Wadhwani, R.D. 0: Theorizing with Microhistory. Academy of Management Review, online first 0, https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2019.0176 

Levi, G. (2019). Frail Frontiers?*. Past & Present, 242(Supplement_14), 37-49. 

Magnússon, S. G., & Szijártó, I. M. (2013). What is Microhistory. London and New York: Routledge. 6 

McKinlay, A. (2002). Dead Selves’: The Birth of the Modern Career. Organization (London, England), 9(4), 595-614. 

Peltonen, M. (2001). Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro–Macro Link in Historical Research. History and Theory, 40(3), 347-359. 

Popp, A., & Holt, R. (2013). The presence of entrepreneurial opportunity. Business History, 55(1), 9-28. 

Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., & Decker, S. (2014). Research strategies for organizational history: A dialogue between historical theory and organization theory. 39, 250-274. 

Trivellato, F. (2019). The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society: Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Van Lent, W., & Durepos, G. (2019). Nurturing the historic turn: “history as theory” versus “history as method”. Journal of Management History, 25(4), 429-443. 

Zemon Davis, N. (1983). The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 

If you have any questions or would like feed-back on an abstract/article, please reach out to one of us (see emails above), we would be happy to look at it and provide some feed-back for finalizing the article for submission. 

HiMOS workshop in Helsinki

Steph

Dear Colleagues,

Consider joining us for the next HiMOS workshop (www.historymos.com) in Helsinki. The seminar series aims at promoting historical methods in management and organization studies and workshops history-informed papers for publication in top management journals. 

Location: Suomenlinna, Helsinki

Time: Friday, March 3, 2023 (full day, including dinner in the city)

Register here (DL: February 17)

Participation fee: Free of charge! We are grateful for the financial support of Jyväskylä School of Business and Economics (JSBE).

We are excited to welcome Dan Raff (Wharton) for a keynote, distinguished commentators, and authors of papers aimed at journals, such as JMS, JIBS, SMJ, and Org Studies. 

Speakers: Dan Raff (Wharton), Mirva Peltoniemi (JSBE), Christopher Hartwell (ZHAW), Saara Matala (Chalmers), Sandeep Pillai (Bocconi), & Rolv Petter Amdam (BI)

Commentators: Rebecca Piekkari (Aalto), Tanja Leppäaho (LUT), Robin Gustafsson (Aalto), t.b.d.

Organizers: Christian Stutz (JSBE), Nooa Nykänen (Aalto), & Zeerim Cheung (Sydney)

Please forward this invitation to anyone who might have an interest in participating. 

We hope to see you at Suomenlinna!

Kind regards,

The organizers

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

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.

AOM Management History PDWs

Steph
Dear management history colleagues,

With extreme pleasure, I can announce that submissions for the Professional Development Workshop for the Management History Division at the Academy of Management are now open!

Look at the Call for PDW here-> aom.org/events/annual-meeting/submitting/… 

Deadline: 10 January 2023 at 17:00 ET (GMT-5/UTC-5)

Inspiring sessions are looked for!

Regards

Matteo Cristofaro

EGOS2023 ST71 – Secrecy & Transparency

Steph

We welcome your submissions to Subtheme 71 on Secrecy and Transparency at 39th EGOS Colloquium 2023 in Cagliari, Italy!

Subtheme 71: Secrecy and Transparency in Governing and Regulating a Good Life 

Submission Deadline: Tuesday, January 10, 2023 (3,000 words all inclusive)

Convenors:

  • Ziyun Fan, University of York, United Kingdom
  • Lars Thøger Christensen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
  • Dan Kärreman, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, & University of London, United Kingdom

The legacy of modernity celebrates transparency as a necessary source of reason, rationality, and good governance (Vattimo, 1992). These ideals and the implied promises of accessibility, visibility, openness, inclusivity, and equality have given rise to a ‘transparency explosion’ in recent decades and a sense that secrecy might eventually be a thing of the past. Although Simmel (1906/1950) in his influential work on the sociology of secrecy argued that knowledge is partial and intertwined with ignorance and inaccessibility, secrecy is often associated with impropriety (Wilson, 1913/2011) and unfairness in ways that benefit in-groups, but harm others (e.g., Bok, 1982; see also Jung, 2001/1933). Secrecy, or the speculation of its existence, triggers a quest for more transparency.
 
While transparency has become the currency of our time, the assumed ‘zero-sum’ relationship between transparency and secrecy, where the rise of transparency reduces secrecy, has been increasingly problematized (e.g., Albu & Flyverbom, 2019; Birchall, 2021; Christensen et al., 2021; Fenster, 2017). The inevitable links between transparency and secrecy establish the parameters of what can be seen, imagined, and practiced in the name of ‘rationality’ in and of our contemporary society. Hence, to understand transparency, we ought to understand secrecy.
 
Despite being identified as an important aspect of organizational life in general and of transparency in specific, secrecy remains under-researched. Existing studies have explored secrecy and its roles in concealing trade secrets and preserving organizational competitive advantages (e.g., Hannah, 2005), in triggering conspiracy and forming the sense of stigmatization in organizational life (e.g., Parker, 2016; Wolfe & Blithe, 2015), in cultivating confidential gossip as part of the unmanaged organization (Fan et al., 2021; Fan & Dawson, 2021), and in (re)shaping identity management that (un)links individuals to an organization (e.g., Scott, 2013). Secrecy, thus, shapes our behaviour and interactions at work in ways that constitute normative orders and expectations, which in turn (re)shapes the demand for and understanding of transparency. Contemporary discussions of organizations and organizing therefore must look beyond the familiar and immediately recognizable and integrate the less observable into our thinking and understanding about the complex and challenging roles transparency plays.
 
Our subtheme is a call to explore new boundaries in processes of understanding the nexus between transparency and secrecy, to speak the unspoken, to reveal the hidden, as a platform to offer theoretical, practical, and policy insights and to address the broader significance of transparency and secrecy in governing and regulating a good life for individuals, organizations, and society.
 
We welcome papers from a range of theoretical and empirical approaches and from different cultures to discuss the possible topics and questions that could include but are not limited to the followings:

  • How could we (re)conceptualize the relationship between transparency and secrecy in contemporary democratic societies? While existing studies indicate that their relationship is ‘mutually constitutive’ (e.g., Birchall, 2021; Costas & Grey, 2016; Cronin, 2021; Fan & Liu, 2021), how should we unpack and understand such ‘mutual constitution’ in a specific (organizational) context?
  • Through the explosion of legislative and institutional reforms calling for further disclosure about the working of organizations, what might be the risks of transparency? Can transparency as a principal regulation and governance of good life lead to dysfunctional consequences? In what ways does secrecy play a role in this?
  • While transparency ideals influence legislative reforms, should transparency itself be reformed for constructive policy and organizational implications on sustainability, inclusion, and ethics? If so, how might it be? Can secrecy help?
  • Does any particular form of secrecy (e.g., Costas & Grey, 2014, 2016; Horn, 2011; Scott, 2013; Taussig, 1999) play a role in the sense-making and sense-giving process of transparency? Do specific approaches to transparency (e.g., Albu & Flyverbom, 2019) provoke particular conditions and consequences of secrecy?
  • Can we learn from historical examples and archival cases about the nexus of transparency and secrecy?
  • What is the influence of the expansion of digitalization, artificial intelligence, and big data on transparency, secrecy, and their interrelations (e.g., Birchall, 2021; Dean, 2002; Flyverbom, 2019; Stohl et al., 2016)? How should we understand the tensions between our ‘right to know’ and technological surveillance; and between privacy and security in such cases?

Looking forward to meeting you in Cagliari! Ziyun, Lars, and Dan

PDW on business education at BHC 2023

Steph

Educating for business – and the business of education

Historical Perspectives and developments

CBS Paper Development Workshop

Business History Conference, Detroit, March 16-18, 2023

The past years have seen an increasing scholarly interest in the historicity of management
learning and education. Studies on historical interrelations between business and education
have appeared as journal contributions and special issues across diverse fields such as
business history, management- and entrepreneurship studies, and didactical research (Bok,
2009; Bridgman et al. 2016; Clinebell, & Clinebell 2009; Khurana 2007; Spender, 2016;
Wadhwani & Viebig 2021), as business schools and educational programs in management
are increasingly seen as having a transformational potential to address present-day global
challenges. Instead of merely educating for business, business school curricula and didactics
are now focused on educating for sustainable solutions and addressing grand challenges
(Gatzweiler et al. 2022).

In the PDW we focus on historicity of business education and, and we would like to explore
recent developments as well as theories and methods that might shed new light on the
historical development of business education.

The workshop offers an opportunity to get feedback and generate ideas of how to develop
concrete paper drafts that deal, one way or the other, with historical aspects of business
education. In addition, the PDW will serve as a forum where we can discuss future directions
and opportunities for historical studies within the area. What questions and research that are
yet to be explored? And what are the role for historians in shaping agendas and research
questions?

Themes to be explored in the papers could include, amongst others:

  • The role and development of entrepreneurship education
  • The historicity of business- and management education
  • Historical responses to grand societal challenges
  • Future directions of business education
  • Business school pedagogy and didactics in historical perspective
  • The historical development of business education curricula
  • Theoretical and methodological perspectives connected to business education

Submitted texts could take form as extended abstracts or full paper drafts. The important
thing is that readers can identify the key arguments, theories, and empirical material, for them
to provide useful feedback, suggestions, and comments.
The PDW is developed in the context of a special issues call on entrepreneurship education
in Management & Organizational History. Potential authors for the special issue are encouraged
to participate in the workshop, but the PDW is not limited to contributions for this
publication.

Participants are expected to read all circulated papers. Please submit a paper draft or extended
abstract before January 10, 2023 to the workshop organizers.

  • Christoph Viebig, CBS Centre for Business History: cvi.mpp@cbs.dk
  • Anders Ravn Sørensen, CBS Centre for Business History: ars.mpp@cbs.dk

References

Bok, D. (2003). Universities in the marketplace: The commercialization of higher education.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Bridgman, T., Cummings, S., & McLaughlin, C. 2016. “Restating the case: How
revisiting the development of the case method can help us think differently about
the future of the business school”. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 15(4):
724-741.

Clinebell, S. K., & Clinebell, J. M. (2009). The tension in business education between
academic rigor and real-world relevance: The role of executive professors. Academy
of Management Learning & Education, 7(1), 99-107.

Khurana, R. (2007). From higher aims to hired hands: The social transformation of American
business schools and the unfulfilled promise of management as a profession. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.

Khurana & Spender, J. C. 2012 “Herbert A. Simon on What Ails Business Schools:
More than ‘A Problem in Organizational Design’. Journal of Management Studies,
49: 619–639.

Wadhwani & Viebig (2021) “Social Imaginaries of Entrepreneurship Education: The
United States and Germany, 1800–2020“ Academy of Management Learning & Education
20(3).

Gatzweiler et al. (2022) “Grand Challenges and Business Education: Dealing with
Barriers to Learning and Uncomfortable Knowledge”, in Research in the Sociology of
Organizations, Vol. 79, pp. 221-237.

New history article in Human Relations

Steph

A fabulous new early modern (!) history article by my colleague Elena Giovannoni has been published in Human Relations – which has become a great place for historical research in management organization studies.

City governance and visual impression management: Visual semiotics and the Biccherna panels of Siena ​

​

Jane Davison, Elena Giovannoni
First Published August 13, 2022 Research Article 
https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267221116035 

Abstract

A major preoccupation in the contemporary organizational landscape is governance and how to cope with conflict and uncertainty. These challenges are particularly evident in the governance of cities, with their complex histories, politics and administrative processes. We argue that visual artefacts can form powerful visual impression management, constituting ‘visual governance’, for dealing with such complexities. We construct a framework from the visual semiotics of Umberto Eco, extended by medieval aesthetics. We analyse the pre-modern case of the Sienese Biccherna panels (painted covers and paintings linked to the city accounts) to show how their calligraphy, heraldry and pictures convey idealized reassuring images of orderly administration, in times of complicated, disordered underlying realities. In demonstrating how art and accounting are intertwined as tools of governance, and that there are contemporary resonances in corporate annual reporting, we add both to research in governance and to visual organizational research, and pave the way for further interdisciplinary work on the relationship between art and organizations.

To find out more about Human Relations, read our latest news and link to free-access articles, please visit our website ‒ http://www.humanrelationsjournal.org. 

CfP JMH SI: Latin America and the Caribbean Management History

Steph

Latin America and the Caribbean Management History

The evolution of management thought in Europe has its roots in the books of classic economists like Smith, Jevons, Marshall, Mills, Say, and Babbage (George & Álvarez, 2005). In the United States, the mainstream ideas that appeared at the beginning of managerial thought belong to mechanical engineering, especially in the books of Metcalfe, Towne, Taylor, Emerson, Gantt, Moller, and Gilbreth (Wren & Bedeian, 2018).

In Latin America and the Caribbean – LAC, the origin was different. The law and political sciences were the cornerstones of developing managerial ideas (Dávila, 1991a; Wahrlich, 1978). While Simón Bolívar was fighting for liberty, the general Francisco de Paula Santander considered that administration was part of the knowledge that the new nation needed to create itself. Santander, governing Great Colombia (today Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama), signed the Decree of March 18, 1826, to include ‘administrative sciences’ in the lawyer’s curriculum in Caracas, Quito, and Bogota (Orozco, 2015).

To further support the formation of a federal state, Florentino González went beyond the ideas about public administration available at that time: the Prussian concept of Policey Wissenschaft and the proposal of Charles-Jean Bonnin in the Principes d’Administration Publique to create an original proposal called ‘Elementos de Ciencia Administrativa’ in 1840 (Guerrero, 1997; Orozco, 2015). In the prologue González (1840, p. 1) pointed out that it is “a book that deals with an unknown science in the Americas, a science that we need to foster if we want to be happy some day” (Guerrero, 1997, p. 52, free translation from the guest editors).

The commerce schools appeared in México and Colombia to teach grammatical, accounting, law, languages, geography, and commercial techniques. The first one was the Escuela Superior de Comercio y Administración in Mexico in 1845, followed by the School of Commerce of Barranquilla in 1881 (Orozco, 2015). In Medellín, the National School of Mining was founded in 1886, seeking to create a new entrepreneurial elite in Colombia, led by Alejandro López (Orozco & Anzola, 2018).

In Argentina, the Universidad de Buenos Aires began to teach issues in management in 1913 under the influence of the railroad and British economists (Fernández & Gantman, 2011). Finally, the Jesuits established the first schools of administration at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1924 and Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul in Brasil, in 1931 (Orozco, 2015).

The development of management thinking in LAC has been neglected in the annals of management history. Well-known books that are part of normal science, like Wren and Bedeian, George, or Witzel, lack chapters or presentations about LAC management thinking. The process, cultural and cognitive contexts, the tensions between the political and industrial organization, the relationships between schools, practitioners, and entrepreneurs, and the public and private forms of managing business are some of the knowledge gaps about LAC that we currently have. This special issue tries to begin filling this gap and proposes a landscape to include LAC in management history.

List of topic areas

  • Regional contributions to administrative and organizational theory,
  • specificities in management and business development in LAC,
  • epistemologies and ontologies in management thinking and research in LAC,
  • the role of the school of management (including globalization and international accreditations, epistemic independence, convergences, and distances between global North and global South)
  • the role (or lack thereof) of gender and multiple / mixed ethnicities in shaping the managerial organization and thinking in LAC countries
  • other forms of organizing present in LAC contexts (e.g., organizaciones otras in Mexico)
  • cultural studies of managerial practices and thinking in LAC, strategy and long-term thinking of nations and large corporations in LAC,
  • impact of the business organization on the communities in LAC, trans-disciplinary phenomena approached by management and social sciences in LAC

Guest Editors

Luis Antonio Orozco | University Externado de Colombia; Colombia

Olga Lucía Anzola Morales | University Externado de Colombia, Colombia

Fredy Vargas Lama | University Externado de Colombia, Colombia

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmh

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/…

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “”Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 2 February 2023

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 30 October 2023

Closing date for abstract submission: 3 February 2023

Email for abstract submissions: luis.orozco@uexternado.edu.co

For the original call see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/calls-for-papers/latin-america-and-caribbean-management-history

SI CFP: Microhistory

Steph

Microhistory in Management History and Organization Theory

Management & Organizational History

Manuscript deadline: 17 February 2023

Special Issue Editors:

Liv Egholm, Copenhagen Business School
le.mpp@cbs.dk

Michael Heller, Brunel Business School
michael.heller@brunel.ac.uk

Michael Rowlinson, University of Exeter Business School
m.c.rowlinson@exeter.ac.uk

There has been a resurgence of interest in microhistory. The classic texts associated with the subject remain immensely popular: The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzburg, 1992[1976]); The Return of Martin Guerre (Zemon Davis, 1983); and The Great Cat Massacre (Darnton, 1984). These provide a reference point, which has provided the basis for increasing reflection on the theoretical significance and methodological distinctiveness of microhistory (Magnússon & Szijártó, 2013), such as the special issue of Past and Present on ‘Global History and Microhistory’ (Ghobrial, 2019). Attention has also been paid to microhistory from management and business history as well as organization studies (Bourguignon & Floquet, 2019; Decker, 2015).

Microhistory offers an opportunity to reconceptualise relationships which lie at the heart of historical research and historiography: the historical nexus between the particular and the general, agency and structure, the micro and the macro. Microhistorians are known for their methodological habit of reading sources forensically in their search for historical clues. It implies reading historical sources ‘against the grain’ (Decker & McKinlay, 2020, pp. 26-27), or as Levi (2019: 41) puts it, ‘beyond the edge of the page’, carefully looking for what Ginzburg refers to as “unintended evidence” (Ginzburg, 2016). The use of microhistory as a magnifying glass can be seen as the equivalent of a detective’s tool. Sherlock Holmes´ working methods are often used as a metaphor for microhistory’s careful readings and detection of clues (Ginzburg, 2013 (1979)), often within “exceptional normal” cases (Grendi, 1977).

For this reason, the trademark of microhistorical methodology is to trace sources and clues throughout and across archives (Ginzburg, 2013). The names of actors, places, concepts, events, or objects are used as concrete entry points to show how previously unrelated spaces, temporalities, and fields are woven together in practice. This mapping demonstrates great potential in revealing unnoticed relations between, for example, family life and entrepreneurship (Popp & Holt, 2013), religious practices and trade (Trivellato, 2019), or philanthropic gift giving and the establishment of the welfare state (Egholm, 2021).

The purpose is not to argue for the universal value of the exceptional; it is to show, rather, how discrete historical events challenge our conceptualisations of the universal, and provide essential clues to what can be considered as normal (Ginzburg, 1979; Peltonen, 2001). Accordingly, the reduction of scale is not the study of the “microness” of a phenomenon (Levi, 2019, p. 38). The reduction of scale, rather, provides the historian with a heuristic tool to craft new theories by distorting or amending metanarratives and reformulating historical concepts and relations. Without explicitly mentioning microhistory, a series of organizational phenomena have been reconceptualized from a close reading of sources, with notable examples being the career (McKinlay, 2002), and entrepreneurship (Popp & Holt, 2013. Thus, microhistory shows how, “history is a discipline of general questions and ‘local’ answers” (Levi, 2019, p. 45).

The historic turn (Rowlinson, Hassard, & Decker, 2014) has pushed for a revised understanding of past context as offering more than simply temporal variables for universal theorising (Van Lent & Durepos, 2019). Historical phenomena often remain, however, reduced to consequences or affectations of particular contexts. In contrast, microhistory calls out for a grounding and explanation of the past through analyses of how actors, places, concepts, events or objects interact and are woven together in contradictory and often different fields and interests. In so doing, microhistory exposes how both individuals and social structures of all kinds are produced simultaneously through relationships and processes.

This special issue’s scope is to explore the methodological, ontological, and empirical strengths of microhistory to advance management history and organization studies. Therefore, we invite both theoretical, and theoretically informed empirical submissions that will further the contribution of microhistory in business history, management, and organizational history, as well as management and organization theory.

Questions and topics of interest for the special issue may include:

  1. How does the use of microhistory question, elaborate, or develop macro theories or broader conceptualisations from within the confines of discrete and particular historical studies
  2. How do microhistorical methodologies of reading “beyond the edges of the paper” contradict and undermine broader historical narratives in business and management and organizational history such as Marxism, functionalism, institutionalism, neo-liberalism, the resource-based view of the firm, and economic path dependency?
  3. What are the advantages and concerns for the use of historical archival research, source criticism, triangulation, and historical interpretivism when innovative microhistorical methodologies work with “dissonant sources” and “unintended evidence”?
  4. What is the impact of microhistory in relation to archival ethnography and the employment of micro historical sources (e.g., letters, diaries, postcards, travel accounts, scrapbooks, and memoirs)?
  5. What is the way in which local knowledge and local environment historically create organizational, business, and entrepreneurial opportunities?
  6. How does a microhistorical approach reconceptualise the relationship between agency and structure in business and management and organizational history?
  7. What is the relationship between the different scales of history? In particular, to what extent do microhistories develop historical accounts that reflect on a granular scale broader organizational and business historical environments and trends?
  8. How can we account for generalisation by using a microhistorical approach? How can local answers reply to general questions by showing complex and often ambiguous connections in historical archives?