Search results

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.

In this chapter, we argue that the practice of electronically monitored “house arrest” is consistent with Foucault's insights into both the workings of “disciplinary power” and “governmentality” and with the self-governing notions of a conservative, neo-liberal ideology, and mentality. Our interpretive analysis of a set of offender narratives identifies a theme we call “transforming the self” that illustrates the ways in which house arrest is experienced by some clients as a set of discourses and practices that encourages them to govern themselves by regulating their own bodies and conduct. These self-governing capabilities include “enterprise,” “autonomy,” and an ethical stance towards their lives.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect back over his career as a management and business historian so far as to consider opportunities for the future of management and business history as a disciplinary area.

The paper consists of two segments – the first half is an auto-ethnographic personal reflection looking at the author’s research journey and how the discipline as experienced by the author has evolved over that time. The second half is a prescriptive look forward to consider how we should leverage the strengths as historians to progress the discipline forward.

The paper demonstrates opportunities for management and business history to encompass new agendas including the expansion of the topic into teaching, the possibility for the advancement of empirical contributions and opportunities for findings in new research areas, including the global south and public and project management history.

The paper demonstrates that historians should be more confident in the disciplinary capabilities, particularly their understandings of historic context, continuity, change and chronologies when making empirical and theoretical contributions.

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 volume presents recent insights in the sociological study of surveillance and governance in the context of criminal justice and other control strategies in contemporary societies. The collected chapters provide a varied set of theoretical perspectives and substantive research domains on the qualities and quantities of some of the most recent transformations of social control as well as their historical precursors in diverse social settings. Drawn from several quarters of the world, the contributors to this volume testify to the increasing relevance of surveillance and governance across the globe and, at the same time, demonstrate the cross-national spread of scholarly ideas on the study thereof.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it seeks to trace the origins of the various strands of postmodernism within German philosophic idealism; traditions of thought which placed emphasis – like postmodernism – on a subjective understanding of evidence and a supposed capacity of human consciousness to continually move beyond the bounds imposed by social convention and being; second, this paper states that postmodernism, rooted as it is in philosophic idealism, is methodologically and conceptually constrained. Its emphasis on consciousness and will marginalize its capacity to make meaningful contributions in areas such as economics, and the wider trends in human history.

This paper is theoretical. It seeks to locate conflicting methodologies – most particularly those relating to postmodernism, positivism and philosophical realism – within the traditions of thought that have emerged since the enlightenment.

Postmodernism is rooted in philosophical idealism. As such, it places emphasis on consciousness, identity and being. The essential problem with postmodernism, this paper argues, is not this emphasis. These are legitimate areas of inquiry. Rather, the central problem with postmodernist-informed research is found in the limited range of methodological and conceptual tools in its kitbag.

Despite the growing influence of postmodernism in its various shades within academia, few of its proponents and critics trace its philosophic origins. In doing so this paper highlights the strengths and limitations of not only postmodernism but also its polar opposite, positivism.