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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the assets of a preventive conservation approach for historical timber roof structures, as a means to improve the quality and durability of maintenance and repair interventions.

The advantages of a preventive approach for historical structures were identified based on two analyses: a study of the structures’ behaviour and an investigation of existing approaches in current practice. The two main identified advantages of the approach, the cyclic process-approach and the potential of knowledge enhancement, were hereafter conceptually implemented in existing approaches.

Current practices focus on single curative interventions, and monitoring is often considered redundant. The importance of monitoring and knowledge enhancement is demonstrated based on the theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS). A preventive conservation approach for historic timber roof structures allows integrating these insights.

The analysis of current practice is a sample survey, and the proposed preventive conservation approach is presented at a conceptual level. Future research foresees a more elaborated study of current practice and detailed validation of the developed approach.

Three new contributions to the existing research on preventive conservation are: arguments for the implementation of a preventive approach, based on an analysis of the structures’ behaviour; the identification of limitations of current approaches that can be tackled in a preventive conservation approach; and the integration of the existing international guidelines and the principles of preventive conservation into a conceptual approach for the monitoring and management of these structures. Furthermore, the research paper demonstrates how timber structures can be understood as CAS, which is a novel viewpoint.

Purpose – This chapter explores various approaches to historical methods as they relate to sport and physical culture research.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter discusses various paradigmatic approaches to historical methods (reconstructionist, constructionist and deconstructionist) and takes up current debates related to archives, newspapers, photographs and oral history as they relate to the method. Drawing on these discussions, I outline various approaches to designing a sport and physical culture project using historical methods, focusing on my work on women's industrial sport in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Findings – I discuss how data evolved from the method and how I made choices about the inclusion and exclusion of materials. The chapter concludes that historical methods are tedious, complex and messy but also exciting and insightful ways to do research. I also conclude by encouraging the researcher to be reflexive and aware of one's ‘positionality’ as a researcher and embrace the historical process.

Originality/value – The chapter is original work. It is not so much a prescriptive ‘how-to’ guide for historical research, but it works to take up current debates in historical methods. It also endeavours to engage students and scholars alike as they consider their research projects and the potential value of historical methods.

Effective teaching, while supplemented by best practice methods and assessments, is rooted in accurate, age-appropriate, and engaging content. As a foundation for history content, elementary educators rely strongly on textbooks and children’s literature, both fiction and non-fiction. While many researchers have examined the historical accuracy of textbook content, few have rigorously scrutinized the historical accuracy of children’s literature. Those projects that carried out such examination were more descriptive than comprehensive due to significantly smaller data pools. I investigate how children’s non-fiction and fiction books depict and historicize a meaningful and frequently taught history topic: Christopher Columbus’s accomplishments and misdeeds. Results from a comprehensive content analysis indicate that children’s books are engaging curricular supplements with age-appropriate readability yet frequently misrepresent history in eight consequential ways. Demonstrating a substantive disconnect between experts’ understandings of Columbus, these discouraging findings are due to the ways in which authors of children’s books recurrently omit relevant and contentious historical content in order to construct interesting, personalized narratives.

This paper aims to advocate a revised perspective in historical analysis. The author calls for historians to apply the concept of reputation as interpretive lens in the analysis of historical processes and outcomes.

Widely used in management and marketing writing, but also relied upon in political science, the concept of reputation helps predict behaviour of individuals and entities that are bound by political constraints to align their actions to the goal of generating a popular standing. The lens also serves to cast light on the actions engaged in by external stakeholders that are informed by reputational cues. This theoretical contention is illustrated in four case studies resulting from investigations into political decisions and military conflicts, both in the republican and imperial period that ascertain how success and expansion as well as failure and decline of ancient Rome can be viewed and better understood by applying reputation as an instrument to direct and focus historical analysis.

This paper does not only advance complementary angles and alternative answers to issues in ancient Roman history. The cases considered also demonstrate how failure to recognise reputation as a significant concept in historical analysis does not only impair a comprehensive and balanced reflection of personal and organisational stakeholder behaviour but also thwarts a full appreciation of the motivation that drives individual protagonists and institutional agents, whose decisions are central to historical processes and outcomes.

The findings advanced in this paper – informed by four case studies – evidence the need of a new analytical prism in historical enquiry that will define the questions raised and direct the researcher’s attention. It has been shown how the concept of reputation can play a tangible role in sketching out a distinct new angle in historical investigation that leads to reviewing current narrative of past events and phenomena.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.

To demonstrate that, at its core, Marx’s critical theory is not a critique of a mode of class exploitation that distorts modernity, undertaken from a standpoint that affirms labor, but rather one that uncovers and analyzes a unique form of social mediation and domination that structures modernity itself as a historically specific form of social life.

Critical reconstruction, interpretation, and application of Marx’s critique of political economy as developed in the Grundrisse and Capital, to the massive global transformations of the past four decades.

Marx’s critical analysis is well-suited to function as the foundation for a theory that systematically illuminates modern society in the 21st century. It is more conducive to grasping the contemporary world than traditional Marxism or most versions of post-Marxism.

The historical transformations of the past century suggest the central significance of a critique of capitalism for an adequate critical theory today. Such a critique must be capable of grasping the core of a social formation that is generative of a peculiar dynamic of identity and non-identity, of pointing beyond itself while reasserting itself. It indicates that the realization of the possibility of the abolition of proletarian labor is a necessary response to a deep structural crisis of capitalism.

Financial intermediaries have contributed to the growing complexity of transactions and to an emerging relational network within markets. This article considers the Eurobond market as an organization in which members adopt rationalities along with diversified and evolving courses of action. The purpose of this paper is to mobilize both historical analysis and organizational theories to show what history can bring to organizational theories using a specific financial market as a case study.

The author used a methodology based on historical events and on a long-run analysis of practices. Professional sources, academic research and databases allow the author to follow an abductive approach. Observations set out of this double perspective are confronted with the conceptual frames of organizational theories.

During the creation and organization stage, the Eurobond market adopts the pattern of a market organization. Then, it takes the pattern of a firm organization as defined by Coase and Alchian and Demsetz or it is a hybrid pattern as Williamson corpus is concerned. In its last stage of evolution, it reveals as a firm organization for all economic models of organizations.

The confrontation of an historical methodology with the economic model of organization leads to the conclusion that the Eurobond market cannot be apprehended as an organization market anymore since it has become a firm organization. Traditional regulation of financial markets does not apply since a firm pattern cannot be controlled as a market one.

The purpose of this study is to examine the historical continuity of James March’s contributions to management scholarship by tracing the co-citations that appear within the textual contexts of articles in premier management journals that cite both March and Simon’s 1958 book Organizations and other works co-authored by March.

This study uses within-citation context analysis to examine 522 passages from eight premier management journals that contain co-citations to Organizations and any another work co-authored by March. This entails coding the citing passages to identify the specific knowledge claims from March’s works and how citing authors used them, which establishes linkages between the content in different works of March’s works as used by citing authors.

This study finds that 31 other works by March are co-cited within the same citation contexts along with Organizations. The vast majority (71%) of these co-citations of March’s later works are to Cyert and March’s A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. The four other most highly co-cited works are Levitt and March (1988); March (1991); Cohen et al. (1972); and Levinthal and March (1993). Of the eight summary codes used in the analysis corresponding with the contents of Organizations, two summary codes – “Routines and Programs” and “Cognitive Limits” – accounted for the clear majority (60.1%) of all co-citation contexts in this study.

This study only examined the co-citations to Organizations in eight premier journals in organization studies, and a larger selection of journals might have altered the results to some degree. A truly comprehensive analysis might consider every citation context in the published literature where citing authors jointly mention any two or more of March’s works. Given the extraordinarily large number of citations to March’s works, this was impractical and unfeasible.

A time-bound and rigorous review of co-citations in common contexts allows both scholars and practitioners to recognize the genuine threads of theory presented by leading scholars and trace them through subsequent works to see how theories have evolved both in practice – reflected in empirical work – and in conception – reflected in theoretical development.

Prior research into citation methodology has shown the proliferation of references over time. It is not uncommon for contemporary works to list 100 or more references for a single paper. This research encourages and facilitates a greater discipline in understanding and using citations by tracing the roots of citations and the extent of their importance in citing works.

This paper presents an historical perspective of the influence of James March’s body of scholarship by tracking within context co-citations that link a seminal early work of March to his most cited works in premier journals. This study tracks specific knowledge claims that have persisted throughout March’s corpus of scholarship. This historical method is a systematic approach to tracing how subsequent scholarship ties together and uses multiple works to support specific knowledge claims, enabling an objective analysis of the commonalities among a scholar’s works over time. This is the first example of research using this bibliographic method to form an historical perspective of a seminal author or a classic work.

The diversity of social forms both regionally and historically calls for a paradigmatic reassessment of concepts used to map human societies comparatively. By differentiating “social analytics” from “explanatory narratives,” we can distinguish concept and generic model development from causal analyses of actual empirical phenomena. In so doing, we show how five heuristic models of “modes of social practices” enable such paradigmatic formation in sociology. This reinforces Max Weber’s emphasis on the irreducible historicity of explanations in the social sciences.

Explanatory narrative.

A paradigmatic consolidation of generalizing concepts, modes of social practices, ideal-type concepts, and generic models presents a range of “theoretical tools” capable of facilitating empirical analysis as flexibly as possible, rather than cramping their range with overly narrow conceptual strictures.

To render social theory as flexible for practical field research as possible.

Develops a way of synthesizing diverse theoretical and methodological approaches in a highly pragmatic fashion.

An investigation of how secondary history teacher education candidates implemented research-based instructional practices for instruction is described as a model of pre-service teacher preparation for social studies teachers. Cohorts of candidates participated in a five-year project while enrolled in a discipline-specific capstone senior methods course and subsequent student teaching experiences. Candidates were surveyed and interviewed concerning their use of, and feelings about, twelve instructional strategies developed with a focus on authentic history pedagogy. Surveys were administered three times: before the secondary social studies methods course, after the methods course, and after student teaching. A variation on the Concerns-Based Adoption Model was used to measure the levels of use and stages of concern of the candidates. Artifacts of practice, including lesson plans from a model unit plan and actual student teaching, also were analyzed to document use of the strategies. Results indicate an increasingly high level of implementation of and comfort with the strategies, as well as the developmental nature of the process. Implications and recommendations for pre-service activities in history teacher education are presented.