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The purpose of this paper is to present a rationale for organizational histories of schools and school districts and discuss the findings of selected examples of the genre.

The author presents a vignette of an organizational history, discusses key elements of the methodology, and offers seven ways in which organizational histories address important issues in educational research.

A case is made, using actual examples of research, that organizational histories of schools and school districts can contribute to testing existing theory, developing new theory, describing how educational change occurs, accounting for the sustainability of educational change, explaining organizational continuity over time, understanding school and district responses to persistent social issues, and balancing an over-emphasis on the impact of school and district leaders.

The paper draws on the author’s original contributions to organizational history as well as the contributions of his doctoral students and others.

Organizational wrongdoing researchers often look to past cases to empirically develop and support theoretical understanding. Their research is therefore conducted at a temporal distance to focal events and frequently relies on retrospective accounts and surviving documentary evidence. These methodological circumstances define historical research practice, and we demonstrate in this paper the valuable insights that historical approaches can provide organizational wrongdoing research. Specifically, we draw on a range of practices from history and the social sciences to introduce four historically informed approaches: narrative history, analytically structured history, historical process study, short-term process study. We differentiate these based on their particular affordances and treatment of two key methodological considerations: historical evidence and temporality. We demonstrate the specific value these approaches represent to organizational wrongdoing research with several exemplars showing how they have been used in related fields of research.

Beginning with the premise that “organizational culture” is a useful heuristic for the study of gender at work, this chapter focuses on the problem of studying the culture of organizations over time, setting out to demonstrate how the social construction of corporate history has, until now, lent itself to gendered notions of business practices. Arguing that history itself is but one of a series of discourses about the world, the chapter outlines a feminist strategy for the study of organizational culture over time that includes: (i) feminist historiography as history written from a feminist point of view; (ii) a commitment to the notion of history as discourse rooted in the present; (iii) a view of women’s rights development as a paradoxical process of progress and regress; (iv) a gender focus approach that studies the impact of discrimination on the social construction of masculinity/femininity and sexual preference; and (v) an approach that is sensitive to the contextualization of gender. British Airways is used as a case study to illustrate some of the problems of historic re/construction and feminist historiography.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how historical materialities might play a contemporary role in legitimation processes through the memorialization of history and its reproduction in the here-and-now of organizations and organizing.

The authors briefly review the existing management and organization studies (MOS) literature on legitimacy, space and history; engage with the work of Merleau-Ponty to explore how organizational legitimacy is managed in time and space; and use the case of two Parisian universities to illustrate the main arguments of the paper.

The paper develops a history-based phenomenological perspective on legitimation processes constitutive of four possibilities identified by means of chiasms: heterotopic spatial legacy, thin spatial legacy, institutionalized spatial legacy and organizational spatial legacy.

The authors discuss the implications of this research for the neo-institutional literature on organizational legitimacy, research on organizational space and the field of management history.

This paper takes inspiration from the work of Merleau-Ponty on chiasms to conceptualize how the temporal layers of space and place that organizations inhabit and inherit (which we call “spatial legacies”), in the process of legitimation, evoke a sensible tenor.

This paper examines the production of a particular nuclear‐organizational history to illuminate the rhetorical and political practices by which stakeholders engage that history as an opportunity to perform preferred ideological narratives. Analysis utilizes data collected from the authors’ reflective participation in this process, and focuses on the tension between nuclear‐historical and ‐heritage discourses. We use the lens of critical public nuclear history studies to show how nuclear‐organizational history contributes to broader controversy over the commemoration of nuclear weapons production in post‐Cold War US culture.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of where the course of the collective efforts in historical research on business and organizations has taken this discipline. By raising two key contributions that have sought to reshape the contours of management and organizational history, the authors trace the work of their field since their inception and, in doing so, critique the utility of these typologies as representative of diverse historical knowledge in management and organization studies (MOS).

Drawing on elements of an integrative review that seeks to critically appraise the foundation of knowledge built in a scholarly field, the authors interrogate the historical knowledge that has been (and is being) produced in three leading management and organizational history journals by synthesizing the posture history takes as an object and subject of study in MOS. Over 400 articles were closely examined and categorized using Rowlinson et al.’s (2014) research strategies in organizational history and Maclean et al.’s (2016) four conceptions of history. Then, this research was used to examine the integrity of these two typologies and their practice by management historians.

The bulk of the work our field has produced mirrors an analytically structured history feel – where “doing history” straddles careful divide between data analysis and narrative construction. Narrating as a conception of history used in organization studies research remains the most subscribed representation of the past. It was found that while some work may fit within these typologies, others especially those considered peripheral of mainstream history are difficult to confine to any one strategy or conception. The authors’ examination also found some potential for a creative synthesis between the two typologies.

Because only three management history journals are used in this analysis, bracketed by the choice of the periodization (between 2016 and 2019 inclusive), this study must not be viewed as being wholly representative of all historical research on business and organizations writ-large.

This research attempts to demonstrate the recent direction management and organizational historians have taken in crafting history. The authors embrace the opportunity to allow for this paper to act as a tool to familiarize a much broader audience to understand what has been constituted as historical research in MOS to-date and is especially useful to those who are already contributing to the field (e.g. doctoral students and junior scholars who have demonstrable interest in taking up historically inspired dissertations, articles, chapters and conference activities).

The research conducted in this article contributes to the debates that have sought to define the scholastic character of management and organizational history. The authors build on recent calls to take part in creating dialogue between and among each other, building on the collective efforts that advance history in both theory and practice.

This paper aims to explore how organizational actors make reference to history and how they use historical reference purposefully in order to affect strategy‐making.

The paper draws on in‐depth case studies on two Swedish MNCs. Data have been collected through 79 interviews as well as participant observation and archival studies.

Organizational actors purposefully construct and use history in order to establish continuity in strategy processes. The use of historical references legitimizes or delegitimizes specific strategic options.

Two old firms with a clear interest in organizational history have been studied. Future research on additional companies, including young firms and firms with less interest in history, is needed.

The purposeful use of history can be a powerful tool for managers to influence organizational change processes.

Very little research on the use of history in business organizations has so far been done. In an interdisciplinary manner the paper introduces concepts from research in history to management research. Based on two rich case studies the paper contributes by outlining what role different uses of history play in strategic and organizational change.

This paper aims to find common ground between the supposed incompatible meta-historical positioning of positivism and post-positivism through a turn to mnemohistory in management and organizational history.

Drawing on the idea of creative synthesis and positioning theory, the authors interject concepts from cultural memory studies in historical research on business and organizations to encourage management historians and organization theorists interested in joining the dialogue around how the past is known in the present. Using notions of “aftermath” and “events,” the idea of apositivism is written into historical organization studies to focus on understanding the complex ways of how past events translate into history. The critical historic turn event is raised as an exemplar of these ideas.

The overview of the emergence of the controversial historic turn in management and organization studies and the positioning of its adherents and antagonists revealed that there may be some commonality between the fragmented sense of the field. It was revealed that effective history vis-à-vis mnemohistory may hold the potential of a shared scholarly ethic.

The research builds on recent work that has sought to bring together the boundaries of management and organizational history. This paper explains how mnemohistory can offer a common position that is instrumental for theorizing the relationships among the past-infused constructs such as organizational heritage, legacy and identity.

The official history of an organization is usually found on the organization’s website and in brochures. The purpose of this paper is to explore the narrative of an institution’s official history, the autobiography, as compared to the biography constructed by researchers.

A case study was conducted on the Organization of Latin American Immigrants in Israel (OLEI), covering the entire history of the organization. Based on a longitudinal, holistic and qualitative perspective, the research methodology combines data collected from interviews, archival and digital sources. The access to these data enables researchers to explore some of the reasons and circumstance behind the construction of the official history.

The analysis of the data revealed a significant gap between the autobiography and the biography in four episodes. The common thread running through them was the creation of a narrative that reinforces and emphasizes the growth and stability of the organization, through the use of strategies such as forgetting, erasing and remythologizing. This narrative was found to have been re-constructed following a period of instability.

The originality of this study relies on the use of the terminology of autobiography and biography for the exploration of the official history of an organization. The innovative research methodology applied in this paper, which compares an organization’s biography with its autobiography, enables the exploration of different dimensions and dynamics, emphasizing the value of understanding autobiography by constructing a biography.