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The purpose of this paper is to disclose new pathways for research and for understanding the relationship between management, philosophy and history.

Textual exegesis of the key protagonists in terms of a critical explanation or interpretation of text.

In contrast to textbook forms of philosophy developed under conditions of abstraction from practice, it is in the context of practice that managers develop their way of thinking. More particularly, the authors have demonstrated through the exemplars of Semler and Welch, how as managers are disrupted in their workday practices of “living forward”, they are able to become reflexively attuned to the taken-for-granted common sense and ideas that have been implicit guides to them. As they are able to recognise their taken-for-granted background common sense, they are able to critique this, subject it to change and, thus, open-up new possibilities for living forward.

The focus of this paper has tended to be rather piecemeal and limited to the impact of particular philosophers on particular management thinkers. To date, there has been no philosophical contemplation of the practice of management per se nor, concomitantly, the pivotal but basically disregarded role of managers qua philosophers.

Given managerial choices and the sociocultural context in which they are made are at the heart of management history, then an understanding of both is critical. This paper argues that the “late” North (2005) provides such an understanding.

This study is a research review synthesizing much disparate but cognate literature across the new institutionalism in organizational sociology/studies and in economics.

“Late” North (2005) provides an important ontological frame for dealing with the so-called “paradox of embedded agency”, an approach that may afford management historians a more thorough account of how institutions are formed and change over time. North has always maintained that institutional change is the outcome of deliberate or intentional choices made by actors. However, and unlike his earlier work which ignores how humans come to make the said choices, North (2005) explicates the sociocognitive process by which intentionality emerges with expanded consciousness, as humans construct ideas and beliefs about reality, beliefs that shape decisions to alter the said reality via the process of institutional change.

It is rather curious that despite North’s status as a “historian”, management historians – or at least those publishing in this journal from its founding in 1995 – do not seem to be terribly interested in North’s work. Although North rates a mention in rival journals, other than Dagnino and Quattrone’s (2006) study, papers in this journal invoking institutional theory align with the new institutionalism in organizational sociology/studies (NIOS) rather than North’s new institutional economics (NIE). Even in the related sub-discipline of business history, those professing an interest in institutions are more interested in the NIE of non-historians Coase and Oliver Williamson than they are in North’s NIE. And, in recent work analysing the place and significance of institutional theory in historical research, the foundations are unmistakeably NIOS rather than North’s NIE.

This paper explores the “proto-Keynesian” ideas of progressive members of the scientific management community with regard to micro- and macroeconomic planning/management.

Based on a systematic exegetical analysis of articles published in a largely unexplored primary/archival source, the Bulletin of the Taylor Society between 1915 and 1934.

This paper surfaces a latent “proto-Keynesian” bedrock among progressive segments of the US management community that provides a more cogent explanation for the wholehearted reception, as well as the decisive impact, of Keynes’ ideas on US macroeconomic policy than do extant explanations in the history of economic thought. Further, it reveals that most of these progressive managers with views as to both cause of and solution for the 1930’s Depression were members of the Taylor Society, an epistemic community devoted to the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management.

The paper adds to the small but growing corpus of revisionist management history that seeks to problematize the received wisdom about scientific management or Taylorism. Few, if any, management historians appreciate that F. W. Taylor provided the basic planning tools which if developed, could enhance humanity’s control over anarchic market forces and aid the construction of a society based on democratic and effective planning.

This paper aims to identify and fill a gap in the knowledge of the contribution of Henry S. Dennison toward management and organization studies and problematize the assumptions underlying the mainstream understanding of scientific management and human relations.

Primary sources are in the guise of archival papers, as well as published journal articles, books and book chapters; secondary sources in the guise of material about Dennison, as well as interviews with family and friends.

The paper concludes that Dennison made an original and enduring contribution to management theory including, but not isolated to, personnel management, organizational behavior and corporate governance that influenced key thinkers of his times.

Dennison was a practicing manager – in fact, he was the president of (what was) his family company which operates today as Avery Dennison – but he still found the time and energy for active public service and to peripatetically articulate his management “praxis”. The paper reveals that much of Dennison’s thoughts and deeds have much relevance today. Among other issues, in his concern with reducing labor turnover and unemployment, in devising and implementing effective personnel management and in his pioneering work on human motivation, group dynamics, goal congruence, worker empowerment and executive compensation, issues of profound importance to business leaders today can be found.

To date, only piecemeal attempts have been made to chronicle Dennison’s contributions to management and organization theory, but these have been scattered across the social sciences. There has been neither any systematic, consolidated synthesis of his contributions to management and organization studies nor of his impact on the thinking of key thinkers of his times.

Throughout his illustrious career Professor Clem Tisdell has displayed a holistic sense of scholarship rare amongst contemporary economists. Tisdell has been prepared to look both within and beyond his discipline and maintain a critical but balanced assessment of the shortcomings of mainstream microeconomic theory and the offerings of rival research programs on a broad range of economic issues, not the least of which includes the focus of this paper, business management. Having a penchant for Marshallian, “fieldwork‐driven” industrial economics and practical application of micro theory, Tisdell has traversed a range of topics of interest to management scholars including management motivation, R&D effort, business strategy, and institutional arrangements making for positive externalities and technology transfer. It is argued that this makes for a better “conversation” or dialogue between economists and management analysts, particularly strategy scholars, as both essentially have at heart a similar explanandum: the nature and causes of value and wealth creation conceived both in micro and in macroeconomic contexts.

The aim of this study is to outline principles for the writing of management history. First, it is argued that if management history is to advance, pessimism of both purpose and intellect must be dispelled. Authors must bring with them a sense of how their research leads to better organisations, institutions, workplaces, economies and social relationships. Second, it holds that the utilisation of the scientific method, based around the testing of research theses, drawn from our existing knowledge and contributing to that knowledge, is management history’s methodological bedrock.

Much opposition to scientific methods in historical research, most notably from postmodernists and poststructuralists, is based on false premises. Drawing on Poincare’s La Science et L’Hypothese (1902), this paper notes that there are no fundamental differences between research in the natural and historical sciences. All studies are conditional.

This editorial recommends five steps in writing management history. First, know how your sources were put together, by whom, for what purposes, what they sought to record and what they did not. Second, use multiple sources. Third, keep your research questions in mind, modifying them as evidence demands. As E.H. Carr observed, research theses are “the indispensable tools of thought”. Fourth, understand the social, intellectual and economic contexts of the study. Context is the key to understanding change. The more severe the restraint on change, the more significant is any change that breaks these bonds. Finally, use numbers as numbers count in history. While statistics must be subordinate to the theses, they allow more complex stories, be they of a society or micro-events within a firm.

The growth of postmodernist and poststructuralist research paradigms has created uncertainty with regards to both methods and purpose among management and business historians. This editorial includes a defence of the values of empirically based scientific research.