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Organizational wrongdoing researchers often look to past cases to empirically develop and support theoretical understanding. Their research is therefore conducted at a temporal distance to focal events and frequently relies on retrospective accounts and surviving documentary evidence. These methodological circumstances define historical research practice, and we demonstrate in this paper the valuable insights that historical approaches can provide organizational wrongdoing research. Specifically, we draw on a range of practices from history and the social sciences to introduce four historically informed approaches: narrative history, analytically structured history, historical process study, short-term process study. We differentiate these based on their particular affordances and treatment of two key methodological considerations: historical evidence and temporality. We demonstrate the specific value these approaches represent to organizational wrongdoing research with several exemplars showing how they have been used in related fields of research.

This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetorical) decisions made by insurance companies and labor unions in their institutional work?

The study is empirically grounded in archival research, involving an analysis of over 9,000 pages of congressional hearings on Medicare covering the period 1958–1965.

The authors show that rhetorical legitimation strategies depend significantly on the specific historical circumstances in which those strategies are used. The historical context lent credibility to certain arguments and organizations are forced to decide either to challenge widely held assumptions or take advantage of them. The authors show that organizations face strong incentives to pursue the latter option. Here, both the insurance companies and labor unions tried to show that their positions were consistent with classical liberal ideology, because of high respect of classical liberal principles among different stakeholders (policymakers, voters, etc.).

It is uncertain how much the results of the study could be generalized. More information about the organizations whose use of rhetorics the authors studied could have strengthened our conclusions.

The practical relevancy of the revised paper is that the authors should not expect hegemony challenging rhetorics from organizations, which try to influence legislators (and perhaps the larger public). Perhaps (based on the findings), this kind of rhetorics is not even very effective.

The paper helps to understand better how organizations try to advance their interests and gain acceptance among the stakeholders.

In this paper, the authors show how historical context in practice influence rhetorical arguments organizations select in public debates when their goal is to influence the decision-making of their audience. In particular, the authors show how dominant ideology (or ideologies) limit the options organizations face when they are choosing their strategies and arguments. In terms of the selection of rhetorical justification strategies, the most pressing question is not the “real” broad based support of certain ideologies. Insurance company and labor union representatives clearly believed that they must emphasize liberal values (or liberal ideology) if they wanted to gain legitimacy for their positions. In existing literature, it is often assumed that historical context influence the selection of rhetorical strategies but how this in fact happens is not usually specified. The paper shows how interpretations of historical contexts (including the ideological context) in practice influence the rhetorical strategies organizations choose.

This study aims to use a theoretical-based case study of two distinct ownership groups of the Jack Daniel’s brand to explore how rhetorical history (i.e. malleability of the past for strategic goals) may evoke and capitalize on different forms of nostalgia. Within, the authors configure four forms of nostalgia (i.e. personal, historical, collective and cultural) from the individual or collective interaction and level of direct experience one has with the past as lived or happened.

This study uses an historical research approach which involved the identification of primary and secondary sources, facility tour, source criticism and triangulation to create themes of rhetorical history infused with nostalgic narratives using compelling evidence through rich description of this fusion.

The findings reveal how nostalgia-driven narratives reflecting different collective longing for the re-creation of an American Paradise Lost used by Jack Daniel (i.e. the man) and later but differently by Brown-Forman. This study uncovers how the company’s inherited past was used rhetorically throughout its history, beginning with the nostalgic story of Jack Daniel and the distillery’s nostalgically choreographed location in Lynchburg, Tennessee. This study delves into this setting to highlight the importance of symbols, details, emotional appeals and communications for collective memory and identity development and to showcase the ways in which they are influenced by different types and forms of nostalgia.

This study adds to a limited number of studies focused on understanding the impact of founders on an organization’s brand and how that is malleable. This study responds to scholarly calls to study the influence of sequenced historical rhetoric on an organization and highlight the relevance of social emotions such as nostalgia for rhetorical history. Finally, the theoretical contribution involves the advancing and construction of a theory typology of nostalgia previously proposed by Havlena and Holak in 1996.

This paper aims to inform the discussion on why and how non-profit organizations can experience a hybridization process to address the criticism that would assume hybridity as an intrinsic characteristic of all organizations. Specifically, by referring to the academies of intellectuals as the non-profit setting in which investigating the emergence of hybridity takes place, this paper aims at exploring, first, to what extent this emergence could be induced by institutional conditions, and, second, which structural innovations could sustain the academies’ “motion” towards hybridity.

This paper relies on the institutional logics perspective and adopts the case study method applied to a historical context. The case under analysis is the Academy of “the Immobili”, which, in spite of its name, experienced a hybridization process in 1720 because of the decision to involve an impresario in the management of its theatre.

The findings highlight the significant role played by institutional conditions in inducing the emergence of hybridity, even in presence of internal resistance to any “motion” from the non-profit setting. Moreover, the analysis of the innovations associated with this emergence detects the intertwined action of the different decision makers involved in the hybridization process, in spite of their formal separation. These findings strengthen the conceptualization of hybridity within non-profit organizations.

Besides referring to a historical period that is still little explored in terms of hybridity within organizations, the paper focuses on an original context, i.e. academies, representing an ancient typology of cultural organizations. Therefore, the paper also provides the first insights into the hybridization process of cultural organizations from a historical perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to present a reflexive review of ANTi-History written as a reply to a critique by James Reveley, published in the Journal of Management History, called “Firm objects: new realist insights into the sociohistorical ontology of the business enterprise.”

Reveley’s critique of ANTi-History focuses on three aspects, namely, matters of ontology, actors and relationalism. Using the logic of ANTi-History, the author reviews each and offers a reply.

This paper demonstrates that ANTi-History is inspired by amodern thought. This condition negates the need and desire to classify social and physical objects in the study of history. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, ANTi-History assumes that historical actors are heterogeneous, and the consequence is that both human and nonhuman actors should feature in the study of history. The focus, in using ANTi-History, should be in-between the human and nonhuman actors that make up the past and history. This is the premise of using a relational lens.

The review of ANTi-History is structured as a reply to critiques of the approach. In reflecting on these criticisms, the author realizes that ANTi-History has gotten beyond its originators. As one of those originators, the author inspired to continue to develop its strange potential.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the pioneering work of the 19th-century French author Jean-Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil in developing a scientific perspective on management, whose origin is commonly associated with the contributions of Frederick Taylor and Henri Fayol.

Through a historical analytical approach and doing a parallel analysis with the origins of the economic theory, fragments of two works by Jean-Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil (1813–1892) are analyzed: The Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Industrial, Commercial and Agricultural Enterprises: A Business Manual (1855) and Ergonomics, the second part of the book Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Political Economy (1858), in which the author devotes a chapter to relevant aspects of management, such as entrepreneurship, production, human resources, finance and accounting.

In addition to noting the pioneering character of these contributions, particularly the emphasis on entrepreneurship, Courcelle-Seneuil’s argument favors in the 19th century a scientific approach to management, contradicting the belief of businesspeople of the time, according to whom management was something practical, impossible to be studied analytically.

This study indicates that looking to the past is essential to know what has already been produced in a particular field of knowledge. This return to the origins is fundamental to understanding how science evolves. Although management as a systematized field of expertise is usually dated to the beginning of the 20th century, there are reasons to expand on the influences that gave rise to this science, particularly regarding lesser-known but equally important contributions.

This study explores a lesser-known contribution to the origin of management theory and seeks to contribute to the study of the origin of the division of the fields of management science, its roots and its intersection with the economic science practiced in the half of the 19th century.