Tag: Uses of the Past

CFP: Uses of the Past – Perspectives, Forms and Concepts in Business History

Christina

CBS Paper Development Workshop

Business History Conference, Charlotte, NC, March 12, 2020

Submission deadline: January 10, 2020

In thepast years, uses of the past hasbecome a prominent research theme for business historians and organizationscholars alike. Studies on the usefulness and appropriation of the past haveappeared across diverse fields such as business history, organization studies,marketing, learning & education, and CSR. Uses of history is fashionable. Butwhere will the field go in the future?

In the CBSPDW we seek to focus on questions that have yet to asked, and we would like toexplore the theories and methods that might take the field forward.

The workshop offers an opportunity to getfeedback and generate ideas of how to develop concrete paper drafts that deal,one way or the other, with uses of the past. In addition, the PDW will serve asa forum where we can discuss future directions and opportunities (and potentialdead ends) going forward with a ‘uses-of-the-past’ agenda. What are thequestions and research that are yet to be explored, and what are the role forbusiness historians in shaping a ‘uses-of the past’ research agenda?

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

  • Uses of the past for branding, strategy and identity purposes
  • Corporate and public museums
  • The use (andabuse?) of organizational anniversaries
  • Uses of historyin action
  • The role and practices of historical consultancies (e.g. WinthropGroup, The History Factory andothers)
  • Historical CSR
  • Theoretical andmethodological perspectives connected to uses of the past.
  • Criticalperspectives on uses of the past

Submitted texts could take form asextended abstracts or full paper drafts. The important thing is that readers canidentify the key arguments, theories and empirical material, for them toprovide useful feedback, suggestions and comments.

Depending on the submitted abstracts andfull papers, the participants and organizers could potentially explore theopportunity of a subsequent special issue on uses of the past in arelevant academic publication, such as, for example Business History. 

Participants are expected to read allcirculated papers. Please submit a paper draft or extended abstract before January10, 2020 to the workshop organizers.

Anders Ravn Sørensen, ars.mpp@cbs.dk

Morten Tinning, mti.mpp@cbs.dk

PDW CfP: Uses of the Past- Perspectives, Forms and Concepts in Business History

Steph

CBS Paper Development Workshop

Business History Conference, Charlotte, NC, March 12, 2020

In the past years, uses of the past has become a prominent research theme for business historians and organization scholars alike. Studies on the usefulness and appropriation of the past have appeared across diverse fields such as business history, organization studies, marketing, learning & education, and CSR. Uses of history is fashionable. But where will the field go in the future?

In the CBS PDW we seek to focus on questions that have yet to asked, and we would like to explore the theories and methods that might take the field forward.

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 uses of the past. In addition, the PDW will serve as a forum where we can discuss future directions and opportunities (and potential dead ends) going forward with a ‘uses-of-the-past’ agenda. What are the questions and research that are yet to be explored, and what are the role for business historians in shaping a ‘uses-of the past’ research agenda?

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

  • Uses of the past for branding, strategy and identity purposes
  • Corporate and public museums
  • The use (and abuse?) of organizational anniversaries
  • Uses of history in action
  • The role and practices of historical consultancies (e.g. Winthrop Group, The History Factory and others)
  • Historical CSR
  • Theoretical and methodological perspectives connected to uses of the past.
  • Critical perspectives on uses of the past

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.

Depending on the submitted abstracts and full papers, the participants and organizers could potentially explore the opportunity of a subsequent special issue on uses of the past in a relevant academic publication, such as, for example Business History.

Participants are expected to read all circulated papers. Please submit a paper draft or extended abstract before January 10, 2020 to the workshop organizers.

Anders Ravn Sørensen, ars.mpp@cbs.dk

Morten Tinning, mti.mpp@cbs.dk

The Library of Mistakes

Steph

Reblogged from The Past Speaks:

There is increasing interest in business schools in History-as-Sensemaking (i.e., the use of history by business people to understand the present and plan for the future). Indeed, this issue was discussed extensively at the recent EGOS conference in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is the site of a fascinating institution, the Library of Mistakes, which serves to make information about financial, economic, and business history available to businesspeople, especially those who are active in Edinburgh’s important investment management cluster. The Library of Mistakes is a  Scottish charity (registered charity SC040205) founded to promote the study of financial history. According to the BBC, it maintains a small but excellent library in Edinburgh that hosts talks by experts.

The company associated with the Library of Mistakes, Didasko Education Ltd, supports the teaching of a course called the Practical History of Financial Markets, which forms a unit of the Edinburgh Business School MBA programme.  The course is also taught at a private venue in London and at a business school in India.  According to a filing with Companies House, most of the people who take the course are professional fund managers. I had quick look at the teaching schedule of the upcoming course in London(31 October to 2 November 2019) and it looks fantastic.

The Library’s mission statement declares that

In recent years financial education has focused on the power of the equation to explain economic and financial forces. This distillation of complex forces into faux objectivity has created dangerous errors in financial understanding… The Library of Mistakes exists to allow students, professionals and members of the general public to study financial history to understand how finance has worked, rather than how it should work if key unrealistic assumptions are made.

New Paper on How Firms Use History

Steph

Reblogged from The Past Speaks:

New Paper on How Firms Use History

Paresha N. Sinha, Peter Jaskiewicz, Jenny Gibb, and James G. Combs. “Managing history: How New Zealand’s Gallagher Group used rhetorical narratives to reprioritize and modify imprinted strategic guideposts.” Strategic Management Journal.

Research Summary
Imprinting theory predicts that organizations are imprinted with multiple intersecting imprints that persist. Evidence suggests, however, that imprints are sometimes reprioritized or modified, implying that they can be strategically managed. We draw upon rhetorical history research and an in‐depth historical case study of New Zealand’s Gallagher Group to describe how one firm managed its imprints. Our inductive theorizing links historically imprinted strategic guideposts to decision‐making via two rearranging processes—that is, prioritizing and suspending—wherein managers use narratives to rearrange guideposts’ influence and two scope modifying processes—that is, constraining and expanding—wherein managers change where guideposts apply. As a first explanation of how imprints are managed, these processes add nuance to existing theory and open new research avenues regarding additional processes and boundary conditions.

Managerial Summary
Imprints are elements of culture, strategy, structure, or decision‐making that emerge when the firm is founded or during times of turmoil. Imprints resist change and make organizational adaptation difficult. This study explains one way that managers manipulate imprinted decision‐making rules so that organizations can adapt. Using an in‐depth historical case study of New Zealand’s Gallagher Group from 1938 to 2015, we follow four imprinted decision‐making rules that we call strategic guideposts and show how managers rhetorically revised these rules to adapt organizational decision‐making to changing environments. Managers prioritized some decision‐making rules while deemphasizing others or they changed their claims about the kinds of decisions where a decision‐rule applied. Knowing these rhetorical processes can help managers leverage their organization’s history to facilitate necessary organizational change.

You can access the paper here. You can download the supporting documentation here.

CfP: Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations

Steph

Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations

St. Hilda’s College
University of Oxford
9-10 May 2019

How do policymakers and economic actors use the past in their decision-making? One of the many exceptional aspects of the global financial crisis of 2008 was the prominence policymakers and commentators gave to the importance of history in helping to determine their response to the crisis. Comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s were a recurrent feature of assessments of the depth and spread of the global financial crisis and reveal the extent to which policymakers sought to ‘learn’ from the past. But how relevant is the past as a guide to the present, or even the future, and how is it used when policymakers, bankers and the public are faced with difficult economic challenges?

The main objective of the conference is to build an understanding of how policymakers and economic actors have used the past as a foundation for their decisions, how they created and discriminated among different interpretations of the past according to their preconceptions, and how they were conditioned by the experiences of their predecessors.

Examples may include (but are not limited to) the development of regulation, the reaction to economic or financial crises, the opening of overseas branches or subsidiaries, and the assessment of the credit-worthiness of customers. We welcome all proposals related to this theme across the 19thand 20thcenturies.

PhD students, early career researchers, and confirmed researchers are invited to submit proposals. Applications should comprise a 1 page abstract/summary and short CV. We have some limited funds to support travel costs and accommodation of speakers.

Please send to:  upier@history.ox.ac.uk

For further information please contact Chloe Colchester: upier@history.ox.ac.uk

Deadline for proposals: 25thJanuary 2019

Conference Committee:

  • Catherine Schenk (University of Oxford)
  • Mary O’Sullivan (Universite de Geneve)
  • Mats Larsson (Uppsala University)
  • Stefano Battilossi (Carlos III Madrid)
  • Emmanuel Mourlon-Druot (University of Glasgow)

The UPIER project is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme 3 Uses of the Past which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, BMBF via DLR-PT, CAS, CNR, DASTI, ETAg, FWF, F.R.S. – FNRS, FWO, FCT, FNR, HAZU, IRC, LMT, MIZS, MINECO, NWO, NCN, RANNÍS, RCN, SNF, & VIAA.

The UPIER project has also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 649307

CfP: Time in Organizations

Steph1 Comment

Call for Papers
Time in Organizations

23rd Colloquium in the History of Management and Organizations
Paris, Cité Internationale Universitaire

May 22th-23rd 2018

Organizations, such as firms, professions, institutions, etc. are exposed to management
constraints (e.g. accounting terms) and political horizons (e.g. election of professional
association’s chairman, terms of office) that are engaged in a short-time frame.
Yet, the definition of organizations’ strategy is placed on a future strongly dependent on
abilities to imagine forthcoming events. In this sense, organizations’ dynamism is often
linked with the ability to plan for the future.
A third temporality crosses through organizations and refers to a very short period of
time, associated with everyday life. As when one plans for the future, this temporality is
uncertain and unpredictable and often implies to make decisions in emergency
situations.
A fourth temporality consists of looking at the past. Probably “less conscious” than other
temporalities, it still gives a chance to take action and appears to be central to
organizations. It is in this temporality that organization gets enough experience to face
actual situations, to deal with medium-term perspectives and to plan for the future. Put
differently, this fourth temporality shapes the organizational future. In turn, it can also
be shaped by the organization itself that writes/ rewrites its own history and use it to
legitimate specific decisions and broader strategies. Still, this fourth type of temporality
is the one, which probably attracts the least interest in organizations. This lack of
interest is worth scrutinizing.
This conference aims at questioning different types of temporalities within
organizations. In particular, its objectives are to combine different temporalities and to
discuss further the relevance of the past, especially to deal with present and to better
plan for the future. We invite diverse contributions to stress the importance of the past,
to assess the relevance of history for organizations and to seek evaluating its imprint on
current decisions.
The use of history by organizations will be discussed and better specified: to what extent
are organizations interested by their past? Which records are available and which tracks
are used to this effect? Which archives are accessible to write organizational history?
What is the role of archives, the relevance of oral and written evidence as well as the
place of family dynasties in the understanding of organizations?

Three main sub-themes could be discussed in a critical perspective:

  • The use of the past: What is history used for and who could use it? This question has to be placed within specific political, economic, social and family contexts (these could be wars, periods of social conflicts, contexts of filing for bankruptcy, etc.). Historical manipulations, propaganda or advertising analysis, critical outlooks on narratives at the company’s (or its founder) glory written for anniversaries are many potential topics to explore.
  • The sources of the past: Which archival material is accessible to write organizational histories in the case of small or big companies, stable or past businesses? The objective here is to challenge archives and archivists, question the missions of business historians, assess the opportunity to conduct transdisciplinary research and relevant methods to combine different temporalities.
  • The limits of organizational history: In a period of globalization and financialization, what is the point of conducting business history for organizations that are often developed at the national level? To what extent can past events help these organizations to better plan for their future? Why are organizations often that little interested by their past?

All communications that address a critical perspective on temporalities are welcome.
Topics related with the domains of accounting, management as well as strategy, public
management, marketing, and (financial) communication are particularly expected.
More generally and like in previous years, all projects of communications involved with
a historical dimension are welcome.
References:
Brunninge, O., 2009. Using history in organizations: How managers make purposeful reference to history in strategy processes, Journal of organizational Change Management, 22 (1) 8-26.
Bucheli, M., Wadhwani, R.D., 2014. Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Cailluet, L., Lemarchand, Y., 2013. Introduction. L’école d’Orvault ? in L. Cailluet, Y. Lemarchand & M.-E. Chessel (Eds.), Histoire et sciences de gestion. Paris, FNEGE, Vuibert.
Cerutti, M., Fayet, J.-F., Porret, M. (Eds.), 2006. Penser l’archive. Histoires d’archives – archives d’histoire, Lausanne, Editions Antipodes.
Clark, P., Rowlinson, M., 2004. The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an “Historic Turn”? Business History. 46, 331–352.
Lipartito, K., 2014. Historical sources and data. in M. Bucheli & R. D. Wadhwani (Eds.),
Organizations in time. History, theory, methods, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Potin, Y., 2013. L’historien en «ses» archives. in C. Granger (Ed.), A quoi pensent les historiens ? Faire de l’histoire au XXIe siècle, Paris, Editions Autrement.
Prost, A., 2010. Douze leçons sur l’histoire, Paris, Editions du Seuil.
Schultz, M., Hernes, T., 2013. A Temporal Perspective on Organizational Identity. Organization. Science. 24, 1–21.
Suddaby, 2016. “Carte blanche” – Toward a Historical Consciousness: Following the Historic Turn in Management Though. M@n@gement 19, 46–60.
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Suddaby, R., Foster, W.M., Quinn Trank, C., 2010. Rhetorical history as a source of competitive advantage, in Joel A.C., B., Lampel, J. (Eds.), The Globalization of Strategy Research. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, p. 147–173.
Whetten, D., Foreman, P., Dyer, W.G., 2014. Organizational identity and family business.
Sage handbook in family business, 480–497
Deadlines
Submission and Review of Papers: Short papers (3.000 signs) written either in English or
French should be submitted no later than January 29th, 2018. Full texts will be accepted.
Notification of Acceptance: Notification of papers accepted for inclusion in the conference program will be made by March 19th, 2018.
All papers will be subject to a double-blind refereeing process and will be published on the Conference Web site, unless otherwise advised.
Definitive version of Papers (30.000 in 50.000 signs): April 9th, 2018. Definitive papers should be written either in English or French with summaries in French and English.
Proposals should be sent to: jhmo2018@univ-lr.fr

Scientific Committee
David Alexander, University of Birmingham
Lise Arena, Université Côte d’Azur
Régis Boulat, Université de Haute-Alsace
Eugénie Briot, Université de Marne-la-Vallée
Ludovic Cailluet, EDHEC Business School
Garry Carnegie, RMIT University. Editor for Accounting History
Mathieu Floquet, Université de Lorraine
Patrick Fridenson, EHESS, Chief Editor for Entreprises et Histoire
Éric Godelier, Ecole Polytechnique
Hélène Gorge, Université de Lille-Skema Business School
André Grelon, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Pierre Labardin, Université de Paris-Dauphine
Eve Lamendour, Université de la Rochelle
Yannick Lemarchand, Université de Nantes
Cheryl Mc Watters, University of Alberta. Editor for Accounting History Review (to be confirmed)
Laurence Morgana, CNAM
Marc Nikitin, Université d’Orléans
Éric Pezet, Université Paris X – Nanterre
Andrew Popp, University of Liverpool. Chief Editor for Enterprise and Society
Nicolas Praquin, Université Paris-Sud
Paulette Robic, Université de Nantes
Jean-Luc Rossignol, Université de Franche-Comté
Béatrice Touchelay, Université de Lille
Organizing Committee
Lise Arena, Université Côte d’Azur
Régis Boulat, Université de Haute-Alsace
Mathieu Floquet, Université de Lorraine
Hélène Gorge, Université de Lille
Pierre Labardin, Université de Paris-Dauphine
Eve Lamendour, Université de la Rochelle
Eric Pezet, Université Paris X – Nanterre
Paulette Robic, Université de Nantes
Béatrice Touchelay, Université de Lille

Job: Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations

Steph

Exciting opportunity at Oxford University

Research Associate – Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations

Faculty of History, George Street, Oxford

Grade 7: £31,076 p.a.

An exciting new opportunity has arisen for a Research Associate to conduct their own research and contribute to a major international project. The research will focus on international banking and financial markets to examine how the past is used in the assessment of risk, how reputation was built and what lessons were drawn from successive crises.

You will manage your own research and administrative activities, undertaking archival work as required and developing your own ideas for new projects. You will participate in project workshops and conferences, collaborate in the preparation of publications, and contribute to the project’s social media and public engagement activities.

You will hold a doctorate in a relevant subject (or show evidence that a doctorate is imminent) and have an excellent knowledge of relevant research languages. You will have the capacity for independent research along with the ability to work collaboratively with the team and a willingness to develop a knowledge of the wider historical context of your own research area. You must also have exceptional communication skills which you will use to successfully promote the project through publication and presentations.

This post is full-time for a fixed-term of 2 years, tenable from 1 September 2017 or as soon as possible thereafter. Applications are particularly welcome from women and black and minority ethnic candidates who are under-represented in Oxford.

Applications for this vacancy are to be made online. To apply for this role and for further details please contact the person below.

The deadline for applications is 12.00 noon on 30 August 2017.

Contact Person : Jeannie Scott

Vacancy ID : 129767

Contact Phone : 01865 615019

Closing Date : 30-Aug-2017

Contact Email : recruitments@history.ox.ac.uk

 

Workshop report: Pop Nostalgia

Steph

The German Historical Institute published a workshop report on an interesting event on pop nostalgia & uses of the past that took place last year here: https://www.ghil.ac.uk/pop_nostalgia.html

Pop Nostalgia: The Uses of the Past in Popular Culture

 

Pop nostalgia, we are told, is everywhere. Our current golden age of television—from Mad Men to Vinyl, Downton Abbey to Call the Midwife—lovingly recreates earlier periods of the twentieth century, while club nights devoted to the 1980s or 1990s allow us to return to our youth. What is more, popular culture is, in the words of music journalist Simon Reynolds, addicted to its own past. It not only reminisces, it revives, reissues, remixes earlier forms and styles instead of coming up with genuinely new. Finally, our most modern technologies are always also time machines: producing sepia-coloured images of the present for an anticipated nostalgic recollection in the future.

These very different cultural phenomena, which are often subsumed under the term nostalgia, raise a number of still under-explored questions. How new is this development, given that period films are as old as the cinema and that popular culture and music has drawn on earlier periods as long as it exists? Can the recycling of old styles and forms not also be highly creative and result in innovations? Are period settings and costumes, retro and vintage styles as such indicative and synonymous with nostalgia? Is it really nostalgia that drives our interest in and our engagement with the past? And if not what other motivations are at play? What role, for example, have media technologies such as film and the internet played in preserving the culture of the past in the present?

These are some of the questions the workshop Pop Nostalgia addresses. It explores the uses of the past in popular culture across all media and genre, from literature, cinema, television, and video games to theme park, club nights and sports events. It is interested not only in representations of the past but also in their production and circulation as well as in audiences and reception. The workshop is particularly interested in the historical dimension of pop nostalgia.

ESRC seminar on “Nostalgia & History”

Steph1 Comment

Nostalgia, Emotions & Organizational History

Wednesday 15 June 2016

The fifth seminar in our series will take place in Birmingham, hosted by Aston Business School at the Bond in Digbeth. Digbeth is a fitting place to consider the subject of nostalgia, as it is Birmingham’s post-industrial urban regeneration zone between the Bullring and the future HS2 station. It’s many empty warehouses and buildings have become venues for clubs featuring Northern Soul Dancing Classes, the Digbeth Dining Club, and alternative shops at the Custard Factory. Nearby is Birmingham’s oldest pub, the Old Crown, dating back to 1368.

If you would like to attend, please register for free here and enter the code ABS1.

The preliminary program so far:

0930-1000      Arrival and Refreshments

1000-1015       Welcome and Introduction

1015-1130        Yiannis Gabriel (Bath): “Organizational Nostalgia”

1130-1145       Coffee/Tea

1145-1230       Constantine Sedikides (Southampton): “Organizational Nostalgia Increases Work Meaning: The Moderating Role of Burnout”

1230-1330       Italian Buffet Lunch

1330-1415       Agnes Delahaye (Lyon 2): “Usable pasts and the anxieties of nostalgia: colonization and historiography in New England”

1415-1500       Eva C Heesen (Hannover): “Nostalgia and Museums: Invaluable Tool or Curse?”

1500-1530       Coffee/Tea and cake

1530-1615       Marie MacLean (Bath) & Charles Harvey (Newcastle): “Nostalgia, metaphor and the subjective understanding of historic identity transition”

1615-1645      Discussion and Closing Remarks

1645-1830      Drinks reception

As an ESRC funded seminar, attendance is free. Please register here and enter the code ABS1. If you have any questions, please contact the organizers: Prof Stephanie Decker (s.decker[at]aston.ac.uk) or Mr Adam Nix (nixaj[at]aston.ac.uk).

PDW on the Uses of the Past

Steph

Today the first of two joint seminars at CBS on organizational history took place, focusing on the forthcoming special issue in Organization Studies. While the presentations were very short, allowing authors to only present the gist of their ideas, this meant that the discussions about the papers were lively and further fleshed out what we mean by “Uses of the Past”. How do we differentiate the past from history, how does it relate to time and temporality, what type of histories are useful to organizations? The special issue editors also used to opportunity to highlight their aims and plans for handling papers going forward.

 

Program: Paper Development Workshop “Uses of the Past”, December 9, 2015 – CBS

9.00 – 9.15             Welcome & introduction

9.15 – 9.45             Karim Ben Slimane, Institut supérieur du commerce de
Paris & Tao Wang, Grenoble Ecole de Management: “Absinthe Reborn: Relegitimation of Deinstitutionalized Practices”, Commentator: Andrew Popp, University of Gothenburg

9.45 – 10.15          Marianne Bertelsen, Copenhagen Business School: “Uses of Time: Organizing the Messy Temporalities of Contemporary Art”, Commentator: Mads Mordhorst , Copenhagen Business School

10.15 – 10.35        Coffee

10.35 – 11.05        Ron Kerr, University of Edinburgh & Sarah Robinson, University of Leicester: “Confecting a Corporate History: Uses of the Past in the Digital Age – The Case of the Mondelez International Website”,       Commentator: Roy Suddaby, University of Victoria

11.05 – 11.35        Rebecca Kahn, King’s College: “The Career of the Catalogue: Exploring Uses of the Past in the Context of the British Museum’s Digitization Strategy”, Commentator: Andrew Popp, University of Gothenburg  

11.35 – 11.50     Michael Rowlinson, Queen Mary University of London Senior Editor for Organization Studies

11.50 – 12.45        Lunch

12.45 – 13.15        William Foster, University of Alberta: “Authentic Rhetorical History: The Enactment of Sincerity & Credibility”, Commentator: Dan Wadhwani, University of the Pacific

13.15 – 13.45        Innan Sasaki, University of Turku & Davide Ravasi, City University London: “Maintaining Commitments for Centuries in Multi-Centenary Shinise Firm in Kyoto”, Commentator: Dan Wadhwani, University of the Pacific

13.45 – 14.10        Coffee break

14.10 – 14.40        Ida Lunde Jorgensen, Copenhagen Business School: “Organised Emotions: Strategic and Institutional Uses of the Past by Family Philanthropic Foundations”, Commentator: Dan Wadhwani, University of the Pacific

14.40 – 15.10        Tracy Wilcox, UNSW Business School: “A Convenient Amnesia? Organised Forgetting and Narratives of Safety in Qantas”, Commentator: Roy Suddaby, University of Victoria

15.10 – 15.30        Coffee break

15.30 – 16.00        Tristan May, EMLYON Business School: “If 6 Was 9 – Rhetorical History and the Instrumentalization of Symbolic Guitar Heroes in the Crafting of Iconic Electric Guitars”, Commentator: Mads Mordhorst, Copenhagen Business School

16.00 – 16.30        Christina Lubinski, Copenhagen Business School: “Constructing the Aryan Firm – Uses of History and Historical Negotiations on Organizational and National Levels”, Commentator: Roy Suddaby, University of Victoria

16.30 – 17.00        Discussion & Conclusion