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The purpose of this paper is to examine the cultural learning process (namely, the development, practice and enhancement of cultural intelligence (CQ)) of a successful entrepreneur – Harold Bixby, a Pan American Airways expatriate, as reflected in the memoir of his experiences in China during 1933–1938.

This study adopts a microhistory approach as a methodology for studying history and the past while ultimately requiring evaluations informed by the present. This paper first identifies the literature gap on CQ development and the need to study historical accounts of the past in assessing the CQ development process. This study then outlines the four key foci of microhistory as a heuristic for making sense of on-going and past accounts of selected phenomena.

This paper finds that specific personality traits (namely, openness to experience and self-efficacy), knowledge accumulation through deep cultural immersion (namely, extensive reading/study, visiting/observation and interacting/conversation), critical incident and metacognition all contributed to Bixby’s CQ development, which was a time-consuming process.

The study contributes to debates around cultural learning and historical organization studies by providing a rich, qualitative study of CQ assessment and CQ development through microhistory. This study highlights the importance of cognitive CQ and the function of extensive reading/studying in the process of knowledge accumulation. This paper draws attention to critical incidents as an underexplored way of learning tacit knowledge. Moreover, this study suggests metacognitive CQ can be enhanced through meditative and reflexive teaching and research practices. These findings have significant implications for cross-cultural training programs.

The purpose of this study is to present ANTi-microhistory of social innovation in education within Robert Owen’s communal experiment at New Harmony, Indiana. The authors zoom out in the historical context of social innovation before zooming into the New Harmony case.

The authors used ANTi-microhistory approach to unpack the controversy around social innovation using the five-step procedure recently proposed by Mills et al. (2022), a version of the five-step procedure originally proposed by Tureta et al. (2021).

The authors found that the educational leaders of the New Harmony community preceded proponents of innovation, such as Drucker (1957) and Fairweather (1967), who viewed education as a form of social innovation.

The authors contribute to the history of social innovation in education by exploring the New Harmony community’s education society to uncover the enactment of sustainable social innovation and the origin story of humanistic management education.

The purpose of this article is to present qualitative research of the past organizational crisis at Mississippi Chemical Corporation that the authors use to theorize a typology of organizational crisis from the leadership perspective.

The authors combined ANTi-microhistory approach and staff ride research design to re-enact the sensemaking of the company’s former crisis leaders and elicit their retrospective oral accounts. A long interview format was used to interview the crisis leaders.

The authors found that the former crisis leaders not only conceptualized organizational crisis conventionally as an event or as a process but also that they engaged in the denial of the crisis to guard the company’s reputation and competed with their claims against the stakeholder claims about the ways how the crisis was to be managed.

Based on the paper’s findings, the authors proposed an original typology of organizational crisis.

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 study aims to investigate an individual’s boundary crossing with regard to bribery, gifts and favouritism in rewarding contracts. Samuel Pepys’s diary was written in the 17th century and through detailed accounts gives insight into his inherent professionalism and his negative opinions around bribery but also his acceptance of “gifts” and awarding of contracts to “friends”.

The research uses a narrative approach to study a detailed and reflective personal diary identifying the diarist’s self-exploration and attitudes around the receipt of gifts and the awarding of contracts. This microhistory is presented with a narrative account of a case study of the relationship between the diarist, Pepys and a supplier, Sir W. Warren.

The diary illustrates how Pepys crosses these boundaries and how the lack of accountability within his role enables him to do this. This detailed study enables answers to questions that with time, legislation and lack of acceptability, have become more difficult to ask and to answer, about the crossing of boundaries and ethical decisions around the acceptance of bribes and kickbacks.

A contribution of this paper is the use of a diary, at least a diary as self-reflective as Pepys’s written up as a narrative account. The use of a detailed diary in an accounting microhistory of this nature gives insight and assists in answering difficult to ask questions around personal motivations for bribery and corruption and contributes in this area. The research contributes in developing research around boundaries and the corruption equation using the insight gleaned from this narrative account.

This paper is an exploration of the potential impact of narrative writing and creative non-fiction on historical scholarship. Framed by the question of where a manuscript would be shelved in the library, this paper aims to survey the role of space, physical and metaphorical, in how we categorize, curate, cultivate and present narrative scholarship.

Using primary source material related to Newark stadium building and a broad-range scholarship concerning space, the author will place them in conversation with historian John Demos’ autobiographical narrative writing style.

The author hopes this paper furthers the conversation on the impact of narrative on scholarly writing and literacy.

By advancing this conversation, the author’s hope is that scholars will expand the possibilities of topics, sources, analysis, narrative styles and presentation of the information they both find and produce.