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This paper aims to chart the influence of McCarthyism and of FBI surveillance practices on a number of prominent American social scientists, market researchers, opinion pollsters and survey research practitioners during the post-war years. Hitherto disparate sets of historical evidence on how Red Scare tactics influenced social researchers and marketing scientists are brought together and updated with evidence from original archival research.

The paper draws on the existing secondary literature on how social research practitioners and social scientists reacted to the unusually high pressures on academic freedom during the McCarthy era. It supplements this review with evidence obtained from archival research, including declassified FBI files. The focus of this paper is set on prominent individuals, mainly Bernard Berelson, Samuel Stouffer, Hadley Cantril, Robert S. Lynd, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, Ernest Dichter, but also the Frankfurt School in exile.

Although some of the historiography presents American social scientists and practitioners in the marketing research sector as victims of McCarthyism and FBI surveillance, it can also be shown that virtually all individuals in focus here also developed strategies of accommodation, compromise and even opportunism to benefit from the climate of suspicion brought about by the prevailing anti-Communism.

Anyone interested in questions about the morality of marketing, market research and opinion polling as part of the social sciences practiced in vivo will need to pay attention to the way these social-scientific practices became tarnished by the way prominent researchers accommodated and at times even abetted McCarthyism.

Against the view of social scientists as harassed academic minority, evidence is presented in this paper which shows American social scientists who researched market-related phenomena, like media, voters choices and consumer behaviour, in a different light. Most importantly, this paper for the first time presents archival evidence on the scale of Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s surveillance by the FBI.

The topic of this article is the contribution of the behavioural sciences to personnel management. I must confess, however, to a distaste for the term ‘behavioural science’ for two reasons. To begin with, it originated as a paraphrase for ‘social science’ during the McCarthy era in the United States. It was then feared that Congressional backwoodsmen would veto any programme or project labelled ‘social science’ because of their inability to distinguish it from ‘socialism’ But the second reason is the more important. In the eyes of industry behavioural science has come to be identified with a particular set of packages and devices — the T‐group. Blake's Grid, job enrichment, to mention only the most prominent. So I shall use the term ‘social sciences’ and make it clear that I am discussing psychology and sociology, and to a lesser extent anthropology, but excluding ergonomics at one end of the spectrum and economics at the other. Political science is included, but best left to the author of the article on industrial relations and personnel management

The film Storm Center was released in 1956, featuring Bette Davis as a librarian in small town America. The narrative is a parable of anti‐communism in the McCarthy era where the town council tries to remove a book on communism from the library. The librarian opposes this and is fired. The details and consequences provide a rich framework for a discursive approach to the text. A discursive approach is chosen because of the film’s extensive use of thematic oppositions around the central concern of censorship and freedom of information. A number of discourses are briefly explored including: femininity; the individual and the group; emotion and scientific rationalism. Concludes that qualitative work in library and information studies might benefit by considering the type of questions posed by discourse theory, as outlined here.

This paper aims to study the role of non-corporeal Actant theory in historical research through a case study of the trajectory of the New Deal as one of the foremost institutions in the USA since its inception in the early 1930s.

The authors follow the trajectory of the New Deal through a focus on Vice President Henry A. Wallace. Drawing on ANTi-History, the authors view history as a powerful discourse for organizing understandings of the past and non-corporeal Actants as a key influence on making sense of (past) events.

The authors conclude that non-corporeal Actants influence the shaping of management and organization studies that serve paradoxically to obfuscate history and its relationship to the past.

The authors drew on a series of published studies of Henry Wallace and archival material in the Roosevelt Library, but the study would benefit from an in-depth analysis of the Wallace archives.

The authors reveal the influences of non-corporeal Actants as a method for dealing with the past. The authors do this through the use of ANTi-History as a method of historical analysis.

The past is an important source of understanding of the present and future; this innovative approach increases the potential to understand.

Decisions are often black boxes. Non-Corporeal Actants are a new tool with which to see the underlying inputs of choice.

This paper aims to achieve four things: to build on recent discussion on the neglect of Frances Perkins’ contribution to the understandings of management and organization (MOS); to surface selected insights by Perkins to reveal her potential as an important MOS scholar and practitioner; to explain some of the reasons for the neglect of Perkins, particularly by MOS scholars; and to interrogate the role of management history in the neglect of Perkins and her management and organizational insights.

This paper adopts a feminist post-structural lens through which the authors focus on major discourses (dominant interrelated practices and ideas) that influence how people come to define themselves, others and the character of a particular phenomenon (e.g. management history). To that end, the authors have undertaken Foucauldian discourse analysis, where they examine various sources that collectively work to present a dominant idea of a given set of practices (in this case, management and organization studies and associated histories of the field). In Foucauldian terms, these interrelated practices constitute an archive that consists of various selected materials (e.g. the Roosevelt Library and the Columbia University Oral History Collection) and, in this case, works on and by Francis Perkins. Thus, the authors analyzed various materials for their discursive value (viz. the extent to which they produced and reinforced a particular notion that excluded, neglected or ignored women from any privileged role in MOS and management history).

The findings are discursive, which means that the purpose is to disrupt current knowledge of MOS and management history by revealing how its practices as a field of study serve to leave certain people (i.e. Frances Perkins), influences (i.e. the impact of the “settlement ethos” on the New Deal), and social phenomena (i.e. the New Deal) out of account.

The objective is to ask for a rethink of the field definition of MOS and management history, to include broader levels of social endeavour (e.g. labour, social welfare and politics) and a range of hitherto neglected theorists, in particular Frances Perkins. Achievements in labour, industry and management of organizations, credited to the New Deal, are overlooked in MOS and management and organizational history. As Secretary of Labour, Perkins researched, lobbied and ushered in critical New Deal measures which transformed working environments for men, women and children with social welfare and labour policies that contributed to the understanding of managing and organizing in the modern world.

This study asks how American institutions of higher education defended the principles of academic freedom (or intellectual autonomy) during the 1950s, even as they became increasingly dependent on the federal government's financial support, their eligibility for which required an oath of political loyalty under the terms of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Universities whose students or professors resisted the oath faced a dilemma of institutional governance as well as intellectual integrity during the early years of the Cold War.

The study draws on documentary and archival sources, including the Congressional Record, the AAUP Bulletin, student pamphlets, newspapers and other publications of the US federal government, and on secondary sources.

The author finds that the US federal government began to invest heavily in higher education during the 1950s, but financial support was often accompanied by political oversight. Higher education institutions and their professors struggled to reconcile a sense of responsibility for national service with a desire for academic freedom. The findings show how the federal government treated institutions of higher education and dealt with the issue of academic freedom during the Cold War.

This study draws on a large pool of primary sources and previous research to offer new insights into an enduring ideological tension between academic freedom, public service and financial patronage.

Somewhere along the line marketers got off track, especially at the academic level. At its core, the discipline is one of persuasion and influence. Yet the concept of power is conspicuously absent from most works on the nature of the marketing effort. That's a hit like trying to teach skydiving by ignoring gravity. Sometimes the results are also similar, in dealing with policy and strategy. The author provides a brief history of the demise of the power concept in marketing and offers a contextual argument for its inclusion as a central tenet of the discipline's conceptual core.

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, to argue for a more historically engaged understanding of the development of management and organization studies (MOS). Second, to reveal the paradoxical character of the recent “historical turn,” through exploration of how it both questions and reinforces extant notions of the field. Third, to explore the neglect of the New Deal in MOS to illustrate not only the problem of historical engagement, but also to encourage a rethink of the paradigmatic limitations of the field and its history.

Adopting the theory of ANTi-history, the paper conducts an analysis of historical management textbooks and formative management journals to explore how and why the New Deal has been neglected in management theory.

Focussing on the New Deal raises a number of questions about the relationship between history and MOS, in particular, the definition of the field itself. Questions include the ontological character of history, context and relationalism, and the link between history and MOS, ethics, Anglo-American centredness, and the case for historical engagement.

The paper argues for a new approach to historical understanding that encourages a revisiting of what constitutes the field of MOS; a greater awareness of and opening up to alternative (hi)stories and, thus, approaches to MOS; and a re-evaluation of phenomena such as the New Deal and other more radical ways of organizing.

The novel The Ugly American published in the late 1950s depicts the blunderings which can take place when decision makers are overly ethnocentric. Happily, in interpersonal dealings, executives are becoming more accepting of the ways of other people. Anthropologists such as Edward T. Hall have developed a wealth of material which explores the habits and customs of other people and how to interact in situations with such people. Thus, overt ethnocentrism is largely on the wane. Ironically, as Westerners have become more worldly in their interpersonal dealings with other people, they have also embraced a strong “global marketing” orientation. This global paradigm contains a “covert ethnocentrism” since it presupposes that the whole world is being transformed in the same way by technology. Although in the long flow of history this might be true, global theories are not usually relevant to short‐term analysis on strategic planning. In an era when we have largely purged our thinking of overt ethnocentrism, we must resist this new “covert” ethnocentrism.

The primary purpose of this study is to examine the effect that information system capability had on e‐business information technology (IT) implementation strategy; and to understand how the quality of the implementation process for IT strategy could affect e‐business performance.

This study performed a survey of chief information officers from 1,000 major firms in Taiwan. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to test for the validity of research hypotheses.

Results showed that the capability of information systems could have a direct and significant effect on the quality of IT strategy implementation, and how the quality of this process could affect e‐business performance.

Every organization hopes to improve corporate competitiveness and transform its enterprise through the effective implementation of IT strategy. This study examined how information systems capability could affect the implementation of enterprise IT strategy. However, since large firms in Taiwan are the primary research subjects of this study, the conclusions may not be applicable to enterprises in different countries or cultures. Future studies could examine the subject from the three aspects of technology, organization, and environment to understand the effect that each of these aspects has on e‐business information systems capability.

With the rapid development of information technology, the introduction of innovative strategy dealing with IT has become an important topic of research, and has become a focus in the era of e‐business. As a result, organizations feel it is important to discover the shortcomings in information system capability factors that must be improved from the individual, group, or organization levels, and develop appropriate implementation frameworks for IT strategy based on this foundation.

This study uses empirical analysis to examine the effect that the capability of information systems has on the quality of implementation of IT strategy. A compilation of relevant literature showed that most studies have focused on conceptual frameworks or have examined the question of IT strategy from the level of technology. Few studies have examined the effect that information system capability has on IT implementation strategy. Therefore, the results and findings of this study could provide an important reference for IT strategy implementation, in the era of e‐business.