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This paper aims to study the origin story of Harvard Business School’s involvement with the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad to study the reasons for the spread of American management education. It introduces both the explicit influence of Cold War politics and Indian development imaginaries to the export of American management thought in the early 1960s.

This paper relies on archival research for its primary source material, drawing upon rich archives of documents found at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School.

Harvard’s role in Ahmedabad was explicitly influenced by the Cold War anti-communist foreign policy of the USA, but did so opportunistically and contrary to the Ford Foundation’s (FF) original plans. Vikram Sarabhai, who was a key player in the Indian national imaginary of development, invited Harvard on his own initiative and forced the foundation to follow his interests rather than being a mere “subaltern.”

This paper could additionally add to the historical debate about the scope and periodization of the Cold War and the role of non-state actors.

This paper covers new ground in exploring the early connection between the Indian development imaginary and business education. It concludes that the export of hegemonic US management education was not successful during Cold War, and the FF was not as dominant as it was made out to be.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the potential of the New Deal as a research context in management and organization studies and, in doing so, forward the role one of its chief architects, Harry Hopkins, played in managing the economic crisis. The exploration takes us to multiple layers that work together to form context around Hopkins including the Great Depression, the Roosevelt Administration, and ultimately, the New Deal. By raising Harry Hopkins as an exemplar of historical-narrative exclusion, the authors can advance the understanding of his role in the New Deal and how his actions produced early insights about management (e.g. modern crisis management).

The paper experiments with the methodological assemblage of ANTi-History and microhistorical analysis that the authors call “ANTi-Microhistory” to examine the life narrative of Harry Hopkins, his early association with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and later, the New Deal. To accomplish this, the authors undertake a programme of archival research (e.g. the digital repository of The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum) and assess various materials (e.g. speeches, biographies and memoirs) from across multiple spaces.

The findings suggest Harry Hopkins to be a much more powerful actor in mobilizing New Deal policies and their effect on early management thought than what was previously accepted. In the process, the authors found that because of durable associations with Roosevelt, key policy architects of the same ilk as Harry Hopkins (e.g. Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, Lewis Douglas, and others) and their contributions have been marginalized. This finding illustrates the significant potential of little-known historical figures and how they might shed new insight on the development of the field and management practice.

The aim is to demonstrate the potential of engaging historical research in management with the individual – Harry Hopkins – as a unit of analysis. By engaging historical research on the individual – be it well-known or obscure figures of the past – the authors are considering how they contribute to the understanding of phenomena (e.g. New Deal, Progressivism or Keynesian economics). The authors build on research that brings to focus forgotten people, communities and ideas in management studies but go further in advocating for space in the research to consider the scholarly potential of the individual.

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.

The 50th anniversary of Fox's Beyond Contract and Man Mismanagement coincides with another vital contribution to the sociology of work from 1974: Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. This article analyses these two scholars' complementary approaches to job design and the extent to which Fox's ideas influenced subsequent labour process thought.

The article's methodological approach is a historiographical reading of Fox and Braverman's thought in the context of their times and later scholarship.

The article demonstrates that despite some noteworthy overlap with Braverman concerning scientific management, Fox's insights were marginal to later iterations of labour process analysis. It delves into the reasons for this relative neglect, providing an understanding of the dynamics at play.

This paper's value lies in its combined industrial relations and labour process historiography. It offers a fresh perspective on Alan Fox's relationship to the latter field of study.

The aim of this research is to understand the relationship between cultural buildings, economic powers and social justice and equality in architecture and how this relationship has evolved over the last hundred years. This research seeks to identify architectural and urban elements that enhance social justice and equality to inform architectural and urban designs and public policies.

The author explores the relationship between case studies of museums, cultural centers and libraries, and economic powers between 1920 and 2020 in Stockholm, Sweden. The author conducts a historical analysis and combines it with statistical and geographically referenced information in a Geographic Information System, archival data and in situ observations of selected buildings in the city. The author leverages the median income of household data from Statistics Sweden, with the geographical location of main public buildings and the headquarters of main companies operating in Sweden.

This analysis presents a gradual commercialization of cultural buildings in terms of location, inner layout and management, and the parallel filtering and transforming of the role of users. The author assesses how these cultural buildings gradually conformed to a system in the city and engaged with the market from a more local and national level to global networks. Findings show a cluster of large public buildings in the center of Stockholm, the largest global companies' headquarters and high-income median households. Results show that large shares of the low-income population now live far away from these buildings and the increasing commercialization of cultural space and inequalities.

This research provides a novel image of urban inequalities in Stockholm focusing on cultural buildings and their relationship with economic powers over the last hundred years. Cultural buildings could be a tool to support equality and stronger democracy beyond their primary use. Public cultural buildings offer a compromise between generating revenue for the private sector while catering to the needs and interests of large numbers of people. Therefore, policymakers should consider emphasizing the construction of more engaging public cultural buildings in more distributed locations.

This paper aims to add further evidence to adoption criteria for “revolutionary” business techniques.

Adoption criteria for business techniques with a high degree of novelty have been developed earlier. The case of exchange-traded funds supports the earlier findings. The methodology applied is explicative.

The analysis supports findings that an effective response to a problem, the availability of a controllable procedure, the means to apply the procedure easily and the hardware jointly explain adopting “revolutionary” business techniques.

The results of case studies, in general, do not permit induction. More research might identify additional adoption criteria or falsify the presently obtained results. Therefore, further research is invited.

Managers seeking or being introduced to new techniques in business administration might use the criteria outlined here for their evaluation.

The author believes this paper corroborates earlier findings on adopting “revolutionary” business techniques that draw on theoretically developed technologies.

This paper aims to offer a new history of management by tracing a religious dimension of scientific management. The thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success in Taylor’s native Quaker Philadelphia in the 1880s. The paper’s main contribution is to contrast the philosophical origins of Taylor’s ideas in scientific management to his native Quaker roots, and how Taylor, over time, into the 1910s, wrestled with this issue.

The paper is situated in historical interpretivism and subjectivism, leaning on contextual and narrative research on religious morality.

Quaker morality prevented managerial opportunism at Taylor’s Midvale Steel in the 1880s. Conversely, by the 1900s and 1910s, interest conflicts between workers and managers escalated when scientific management moved out of its traditional cultural contexts of Quaker Philadelphia and spread across the USA. The historical implication is, already for Taylor’s time, that scientific management never was the “one-best way” of management.

Future research needs to deepen and broaden research on scientific management when tracing the significance of religion and culture in management thought.

The paper has implications for modern studies of business morality by uncovering the practical relevance of religious business ethics at the outset of management studies.

The historic emergence of scientific management points to a theory of institutional evolution and economic growth, when religiously grounded governance of the firm deinstitutionalized, and institutional economic governance, with different but superior economic advantages, progressed by the 1900s.

The paper suggests an alternative version of the intellectual heritage of management studies by tracing the legacy of Taylor’s Quakerism and how religious and cultural ideas contributed to the formation of science in management.

Drawing on the microfoundations theory and rational choice sociology, this study aims to investigate knowledge-sharing microfoundations through knowledge sabotage behaviours in the workplace. As such, it aims to shed light on the adverse impact of knowledge sabotage on a knowledge-sharing climate.

As a quantitative deductive study, it is based on information collected from 329 employees of European companies by self-administered online surveys. Data validity and reliability has been assessed through a confirmatory factor analysis, and data analysis was carried out by using a covariance-based structural equation modelling technique.

The findings from the empirical investigation supported the baseline hypotheses of the multilevel conceptual model, which is the positive relationship between organizational trust and environmental knowledge sharing. Then, recurring to a microfoundational exploration, this study supports the mediating indirect effect of job satisfaction and knowledge sabotage in affecting knowledge sharing as a social outcome.

This study concurs to broaden knowledge-sharing awareness among scholars and practitioners, by focusing on knowledge sabotage as its most pernicious counterproductive behaviour. Furthermore, this research provides valuable guidance for the future development of research based on multilevel investigations.

This study builds on the need to explore the numerous factors that affect knowledge sharing in economic organizations, specifically focusing on knowledge sabotage. Adapting Coleman’s bathtub, the authors advance the first multilevel conceptual model used to unveil the knowledge-sharing microfoundations from the perspective of a counterproductive knowledge behaviour.

The field of broad-based employee ownership within corporations is a specific application of the foundational topic of property ownership. It is situated at the intersection of a broad range of scholarly disciplines including economics, law, finance and management. Each discipline contributes vocabulary and distinctions describing this field. That broad spectrum of disciplinary inquiry is a strength but it also lends a “ships passing in the night” quality to discussions of employee ownership. This paper attempts to unravel the narrative diversity surrounding this topic. Four meanings of ownership are introduced. Those meanings are in turn embedded within two abstract models of the corporation; the corporation as property and the corporation as social institution.

There is no experimental design The paper presents a conceptual overview and introduces a taxonomy of four meanings and two models of ownership.

Four meanings of ownership are introduced. The meanings are ownership as compensation, investment, retirement and membership. Those meanings are in turn embedded within two abstract models of the corporation; the corporation as property and the corporation as social institution.

No hypotheses are advanced. This is not a research paper. A conceptual overview that makes use of taxonomy of meanings and models is introduced to help clarify confusions abundant in the field of employee ownership. Readers may differ with the categories of meanings and models introduced in this conceptual overview.

The ambition of the paper is to describe the various meanings and models of employee ownership presently in use in both academic and applied settings. It is not necessary or desirable to assert the primacy of a single meaning or model in order to achieve progress. The analysis provided here surfaces a range of assumptions about ownership that have heretofore been implicit in both scholarship and in practice. Making those assumptions explicit should prove useful to both scholars and practitioners of employee ownership.

The concept of employee ownership enjoys a relatively broad appeal with the public. Among the academic disciplines that have trained their lights upon it, a more mixed reception prevails. Much of the academic and policy controversy derives from confusion about the nature and structure of employee ownership. This paper attempts to address that confusion by presenting a taxonomy of meanings and models that may prove useful for future research.

This study is one of the first efforts to comprehinsively map the various meanings and models of broad-based employee ownership.

The purpose of this conceptual article is to examine the role of villainification and heroification in social studies through critically analyzing the author’s place-based encounters with three civil war narratives.

The article describes the author’s critical reflections on three narratives involving confederate figures and examines theoretical and pedagogical implications.

The article introduces a spectrum of ethical judgments which plots villainification and heroification on opposing ends. The author advocates for more nuanced ethical judgments that contextualize decisions as understandable or defensible based on evidence. The term understandable reflects a concept of being able to explain (i.e. demonstrate understanding) why a curricular figure made certain choices without agreeing with or supporting those choices. The term defensible denotes the existence of evidence that provides a rationale for a choice such that the person making the ethical judgment would feel comfortable making (i.e. defending) the same choice.

The article introduces a theory of nuanced ethical judgments in social studies that maps onto existing literature on heroification, villainification and place-based education. Pedagogical implications for social studies education are also identified.