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Postmodernist ideas – most particularly those of Foucault but also those of Latour, Derrida and Barthes – have had a much longer presence in accounting research than in other business disciplines. However, in large part, the debates in accounting history and management history, have moved in parallel but separate universes. The purpose of this study is therefore one of exploring not only critical accounting understandings that are significant for management history but also one of highlighting conceptual flaws that are common to the postmodernist literature in both accounting and management history.

Foucault has been seminal to the critical traditions that have emerged in both accounting research and management history. In exploring the usage of Foucault’s ideas, this paper argues that an over-reliance on a set of Foucauldian concepts – governmentality, “disciplinary society,” neo-liberalism – that were never conceived with an eye to the problems of accounting and management has resulted in not only in the drawing of some very longbows from Foucault’s formulations but also misrepresentations of the French philosophers’ ideas.

Many, if not most, of the intellectual positions associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History – that knowledge is inherently subjective, that management involves exercising power at distance, that history is a social construct that is used to legitimate capitalism and management – were argued in the critical accounting literature long before Clark and Rowlinson’s (2004) oft cited call. Indeed, the “call” for a “New Accounting History” issued by Miller et al. (1991) played a remarkably similar role to that made by Clark and Rowlinson in management and organizational studies more than a decade later.

This is the first study to explore the marked similarities between the critical accounting literature, most particularly that related to the “New Accounting History” and that associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History in management and organizational studies.

This paper aims to find common ground between the supposed incompatible meta-historical positioning of positivism and post-positivism through a turn to mnemohistory in management and organizational history.

Drawing on the idea of creative synthesis and positioning theory, the authors interject concepts from cultural memory studies in historical research on business and organizations to encourage management historians and organization theorists interested in joining the dialogue around how the past is known in the present. Using notions of “aftermath” and “events,” the idea of apositivism is written into historical organization studies to focus on understanding the complex ways of how past events translate into history. The critical historic turn event is raised as an exemplar of these ideas.

The overview of the emergence of the controversial historic turn in management and organization studies and the positioning of its adherents and antagonists revealed that there may be some commonality between the fragmented sense of the field. It was revealed that effective history vis-à-vis mnemohistory may hold the potential of a shared scholarly ethic.

The research builds on recent work that has sought to bring together the boundaries of management and organizational history. This paper explains how mnemohistory can offer a common position that is instrumental for theorizing the relationships among the past-infused constructs such as organizational heritage, legacy and identity.

The purpose of this paper is to present a rationale for organizational histories of schools and school districts and discuss the findings of selected examples of the genre.

The author presents a vignette of an organizational history, discusses key elements of the methodology, and offers seven ways in which organizational histories address important issues in educational research.

A case is made, using actual examples of research, that organizational histories of schools and school districts can contribute to testing existing theory, developing new theory, describing how educational change occurs, accounting for the sustainability of educational change, explaining organizational continuity over time, understanding school and district responses to persistent social issues, and balancing an over-emphasis on the impact of school and district leaders.

The paper draws on the author’s original contributions to organizational history as well as the contributions of his doctoral students and others.

The city of Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in the north-east of Brazil, presents a paradox as a present-day tourist destination, while also marked by features and processes characteristic of cities in the Global South, such as high levels of social inequality with fragmented urban margins and vulnerabilities. This research problematizes the idea of “historical ruins” proposed by Walter Benjamin as a viable way to understand how the organization process of today's city margins can be “denaturalized” by the past. The objective of this research is to assess how the urban margins of the city were organized as a history of resistance.

In theoretical terms, this research links critical urban studies with critical approaches to organizational history (COH) based on Walter Benjamin's philosophical concepts of “ruins” and “progress”. The historical and archival methodology, consisting of 193 documents, suggests the existence of a philosophical–historical nexus that helps explain the spatial fragmentation of the city, and especially the urban margins in the western region of Fortaleza.

The Benjaminian notion of “historical ruins” has been exemplified by the Brazilian government practices confining migrants fleeing drought in internment camps on the margins of the city of Fortaleza in three waves beginning in 1877, 1915 and 1932 respectively. The effects of such confinement policies put into practice in the name of “progress” influenced the organization of large urban spaces on the city's margins, whereas on the other hand, the analyses advanced in this research reflect on alternatives to re-frame the history of the organization of the margins of Fortaleza through a set of practices of resistance.

Based on the concept of “denaturalization”, and through re-activation of the memory of a circumstantial past, the gaze of the “ruins”, as represented by the belief in “progress” addressed in official reports of government confinement policies, spaces of resistance have emerged where new possibilities for the future of the city can be imagined.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze current literature on critical sensemaking (CSM) to assess its significance and potential for understanding the role of agency in management and organizational studies.

The analysis involves an examination of a selection of 51 applied studies that cite, draw on and contribute to CSM, to assess the challenges and potential of utilizing CSM.

The paper reveals the range of organizational issues that this work has been grappling with; the unique insights that CSM has revealed in the study of management and organizations; and some of the challenges and promises of CSM for studying agency in context. This sets up discussion of organizational issues and insights provided by CSM to reveal its potential in dealing with issues of agency in organizations. The sheer scope of CSM studies indicates that it has relevance for a range of management researchers, including those interested in behavior at work, theories of organization, leadership and crisis management, diversity management, emotion, ethics and justice, and many more.

The main focus is restricted to providing a working knowledge of CSM rather than other approaches to agency.

The paper outlines the challenges and potential for applying the CSM theory.

The paper reveals the range of problem-solving issues that CSM studies have been applied to.

This is the first major review of the challenges and potential of applying CSM; concluding with a discussion of its strengths and limitations and providing a summary of insights for future work.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of where the course of the collective efforts in historical research on business and organizations has taken this discipline. By raising two key contributions that have sought to reshape the contours of management and organizational history, the authors trace the work of their field since their inception and, in doing so, critique the utility of these typologies as representative of diverse historical knowledge in management and organization studies (MOS).

Drawing on elements of an integrative review that seeks to critically appraise the foundation of knowledge built in a scholarly field, the authors interrogate the historical knowledge that has been (and is being) produced in three leading management and organizational history journals by synthesizing the posture history takes as an object and subject of study in MOS. Over 400 articles were closely examined and categorized using Rowlinson et al.’s (2014) research strategies in organizational history and Maclean et al.’s (2016) four conceptions of history. Then, this research was used to examine the integrity of these two typologies and their practice by management historians.

The bulk of the work our field has produced mirrors an analytically structured history feel – where “doing history” straddles careful divide between data analysis and narrative construction. Narrating as a conception of history used in organization studies research remains the most subscribed representation of the past. It was found that while some work may fit within these typologies, others especially those considered peripheral of mainstream history are difficult to confine to any one strategy or conception. The authors’ examination also found some potential for a creative synthesis between the two typologies.

Because only three management history journals are used in this analysis, bracketed by the choice of the periodization (between 2016 and 2019 inclusive), this study must not be viewed as being wholly representative of all historical research on business and organizations writ-large.

This research attempts to demonstrate the recent direction management and organizational historians have taken in crafting history. The authors embrace the opportunity to allow for this paper to act as a tool to familiarize a much broader audience to understand what has been constituted as historical research in MOS to-date and is especially useful to those who are already contributing to the field (e.g. doctoral students and junior scholars who have demonstrable interest in taking up historically inspired dissertations, articles, chapters and conference activities).

The research conducted in this article contributes to the debates that have sought to define the scholastic character of management and organizational history. The authors build on recent calls to take part in creating dialogue between and among each other, building on the collective efforts that advance history in both theory and practice.

This paper develops and provides insights on how researchers can use ANTi-History with a focus on one of its constitutive facets, relationalism. The purpose of this paper is to, first, develop a central facet of ANTi-History called relationalism and to outline how researchers interested in doing organizational history can use ANTi-History insights to undertake relational histories.

The authors propose four phases of the historic turn literature and situate ANTi-History and relationalism as an outcome of the fourth phase. The facet of relationalism is then explained and explored through five types of relations that the authors suggest act as sites of oscillation, where the past becomes (an immutable) history.

A central implication of the paper involves disrupting conceptualizations of the past and history as fixed. Instead, history is explained as a relational outcome of its constitutive social and political relationships.

The paper theoretically develops ANTi-History and relationalism while providing practical implications and tools for researchers to use it. Researchers are introduced to the notion of the site of oscillation. They are encouraged to focus their attention on five sites of oscillation: past-history, actor-network, human-nonhuman, researcher-traces of the past, and historical inscription-reading formation. These sites of oscillation are places where politics is at play and history is shaped or transformed.

Management history has in the past 15 years witnessed growing enthusiasm for “critical” research methodologies associated with the so-called “historic turn”. This paper aims to argue, however, that the “historic turn” has proved to an “historic wrong turn”, typically associated with confused and contradictory positions. In consequence, Foucault’s belief that knowledge is rooted in discourse, and that both are rooted in external structures of power, is used while simultaneously professing advocacy of White’s understanding that history is fictive, the product of the historian’s imagination.

This paper explores the intellectual roots of the historic (wrong) turn in the idealist philosophies of Nietzsche, Croce, Foucault, White and Latour as well as the critiques that have been made of those theories from within “critical” or “Left” theoretical frameworks.

Failing to properly acknowledge the historical origin of their ideas and/or the critiques of those ideas – and misrepresenting all contrary opinion as “positivist” – those associated with the historic (wrong) turn replicate the errors of their theoretical champions. The author thus witnesses a confusion of ontology (the nature of being) and epistemology (the nature of knowledge) and, consequently, of “facts” (things that exist independently of our fancy), “evidence” (how ascertain knowledge of a fact) and “interpretation” (how I connect evidence to explain an historical outcome).

Directed toward an examination of the conceptual errors that mark the so-called “historic turn” in management studies, this article argues that the holding contradictory positions is not an accidental by-product of the “historic turn”. Rather, it is a defining characteristic of the genre.

The purpose of this article is to address research gaps relating to agency and institutionalism in new institutional theory (NIT) and institutional work (IW) and use the critical sensemaking (CSM) approach to bridge the debates around agency, especially on issues of language and discourse, actor network theory (ANT) and history.

A conceptual analysis of the literature is performed to discuss issues of agency in IW and CSM in organizations, and examples of empirical studies are used to illustrate connectivity, contrast and fusion.

The analysis illustrates points of distance (rather than disconnect), but most importantly, connectivity and the potential for further developments between the literature on IW and CSM.

Discussion around new possibilities to focus on agency has the potential to contribute to humanist thinking about the (agentic) character of organizations and the potential for social change.

The article contributes to the discussion of agency in the organization through a starting point (i.e. CSM) outside of NIT.

The purpose of this paper is to examine March and Olsen’s 1983 study of American Government reorganization attempts between 1904 and 1980 in relation to three debates in management history scholarship. Can explorations of the past yield innovative interpretations of the present and future organizational activities? What is the role of multiple perspectives in understanding complex reality? How should management historians react to the differences in power held by various actors in historical scenarios and to the absence of documented evidence of the stances of many traditionally underrepresented groups?

The paper analyzes March and Olsen’s 1983 historical study on federal government reorganizations in relation to twentieth-century political science/public administration scholarship from 1919 to the present showing the unique focus and conclusion of March and Olsen’s work. The paper relates this focus and conclusions to three management questions.

This analysis shows that March and Olsen’s interpretation of American reorganization has had a significant impact on the work of political scientists studying programs that did not exist in 1983; this impact suggests how historical scholarship can invigorate understanding of current programs. The analysis also gives evidence to support March and Olsen’s focus on the importance of considering multiple perspectives to interpret complex realities. The analysis concludes that despite March’s acknowledging the importance of anti-establishment scholarship, March and Olsen’s 1983 work did not explore the role of power differentials or the voices of the oppressed in government reorganizations.

The value of this paper is that it seeks to relate March and Olsen’s work to a scholarship domain where it has not often been considered. Management historians lament that their work and concerns have often been considered peripheral by the greater management field. By showing how a major management theorist such as March used historical analysis to further understanding of contemporary organizations the paper heightens the visibility and importance of management history work.