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This paper aims to use the origin story of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management as a foil for unpacking the tensions between deep disciplinary specialization and liberal education in business schools in Canada and the USA. Ultimately, the paper reveals that those tensions are not irreconcilable, and that through the fortunes of historical contingencies and deliberate decision-taking, a faculty can embrace the benefits of both breadth and depth.

The paper proposes a critical organizational history of management education through a case study. By drawing on secondary literature and archival sources, the authors focus on moments in business education, such as the founding of the Wharton School of Business, the release of the Carnegie and Ford Reports and the trend towards increased specialization to situate a case study of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management.

The authors find that the evolution of business education in North America from its broad, liberal origins towards narrow, specialization has come at a cost to some of the benefits of business and management education. An alternative approach, one reflected in the design of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management, its programme offerings and its interconnection with other disciplines, enables the advantages of deep disciplinarity to co-exist (and cross-inform) with the advantages of liberal approach to knowledges.

The Dalhousie model offers business schools an example of a faculty that balances the rich insights of liberal interdisciplinarity with the need for sophisticated approaches to more granular, often disciplinary, topics. In addition, the paper offers the story of a multidisciplinary management faculty, some explanation for how that faculty was maintained despite pressures towards specialization; and in doing so, contributes to the limited historical research of management education, particularly in Canada, post-2000.

This paper illustrates the socio-political nature of accountings, referring to the partial privatisation of the monopoly telecommunications organisation in a lower-middle-income country.

Actor-network theory and an ANTi-history approach are used to trace circumstances and occurrences. Empirical materials include official documents, print media and retrospective interviews with organisation employees ten years on from the privatisation.

Proponents of privatisation used retrospectively constructed historical accounts to problematise the natural monopoly of telecommunications and the government organisation administering it. A restructuring programme followed. Proponents addressed controversies pertaining to the programme thus garnering widespread support for complex and controversial changes. Proponents produced and reproduced accounting artefacts as evidence in these processes of history reconstruction, consequent changes and restoring stability to telecommunications in its reconfigured commercial domain. The proponents used selective, controversial accounting evidence to problematise the government organisation's existence, then to mobilise various actors to reduce and close the controversies previously aroused and reinstate stability in a partially privatised telecommunications company. Although no longer having a monopoly this company still dominates. Dissenters did the same but with little success.

The findings demonstrate the importance of tracing the socio-political process of arriving at the dominant outcome about the past. This assists in making sense of present circumstances and re-imagining the future.

The study demonstrates that, during controversial circumstances, taken-for-granted history, as well as what is thought to have not existed in the past, support the dominant network in gaining advantage over their opponents and black-boxing their perspectives of how things should be.

This paper aims to study the origin story of Harvard Business School’s involvement with the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad to study the reasons for the spread of American management education. It introduces both the explicit influence of Cold War politics and Indian development imaginaries to the export of American management thought in the early 1960s.

This paper relies on archival research for its primary source material, drawing upon rich archives of documents found at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School.

Harvard’s role in Ahmedabad was explicitly influenced by the Cold War anti-communist foreign policy of the USA, but did so opportunistically and contrary to the Ford Foundation’s (FF) original plans. Vikram Sarabhai, who was a key player in the Indian national imaginary of development, invited Harvard on his own initiative and forced the foundation to follow his interests rather than being a mere “subaltern.”

This paper could additionally add to the historical debate about the scope and periodization of the Cold War and the role of non-state actors.

This paper covers new ground in exploring the early connection between the Indian development imaginary and business education. It concludes that the export of hegemonic US management education was not successful during Cold War, and the FF was not as dominant as it was made out to be.

This paper aims to explore how researchers in general, and field researchers in particular, might respond to systems of governance of the researchers' activity in ways that can support rather than distort the quality of the research.

We draw upon literature on serendipity to develop a framework for engaging with the positive and negative potentials of systems of governance. We ground our analysis in discussion of participation in the field comprising two parts: first, the examination of our own activities and second, the accounts of participation found in two career-autobiographical interviews with emeritus professors of management accounting from Japan.

We highlight the potential for a productive tension between two contrasting perspectives that researchers might take on governance of their activity. A contractual perspective sees the value of targets and detailed pre-planning. A reflexive perspective sees the value of exploring the unexpected and considering many alternatives. We offer a framework for considering serendipity and the conditions that facilitate serendipity to help researchers maintain a productive tension between these perspectives.

We build upon retrospective accounts of two successful individuals whose careers evolved in a specific context. The intention is not to set out what might be generally achievable in a research career, nor to propose specific lines of action or planning in relation to specific systems of governance, since these vary across countries and over time. Rather, the paper draws on these materials to illuminate the more general challenge of preparing for serendipity in a way that goes beyond simple opportunism.

We analyse how researchers' mindfulness of serendipity and the nature of contexts that facilitate serendipity can encourage a productive tension between contractual and reflexive perspectives on governance of academic activity.

The purpose of this article is to address research gaps relating to agency and institutionalism in new institutional theory (NIT) and institutional work (IW) and use the critical sensemaking (CSM) approach to bridge the debates around agency, especially on issues of language and discourse, actor network theory (ANT) and history.

A conceptual analysis of the literature is performed to discuss issues of agency in IW and CSM in organizations, and examples of empirical studies are used to illustrate connectivity, contrast and fusion.

The analysis illustrates points of distance (rather than disconnect), but most importantly, connectivity and the potential for further developments between the literature on IW and CSM.

Discussion around new possibilities to focus on agency has the potential to contribute to humanist thinking about the (agentic) character of organizations and the potential for social change.

The article contributes to the discussion of agency in the organization through a starting point (i.e. CSM) outside of NIT.

This study aims to explore human–machine interactions in the process of adopting artificial intelligence (AI) based on the principles of Taylorism and digital Taylorism to validate these principles in postmodern management.

The topic has been investigated by means of a case study based on the current experience of Carrozzeria Basile, a body shop born in Turin in 1970.

The Carrozzeria Basile’s approach is rooted in scientific management concepts, and its digital evolution is aimed at centring humans, investigating human–machine interactions and how to take advantage of both of these.

The research contributes to both Taylorism management and the literature on human–machine interactions. A unique case study represents a first step in comprehending the phenomenon but could also represent a limit for the study.

Practical implications refer to the scientific path to facilitate the implementation and adoption of emerging technologies in the organisational process, including employee engagement and continuous employee training.

The research focuses on human–machine interactions in the process of adopting AI in the automation process. Its novelty also relies on the comprehension of the needed path to facilitate these interactions and stimulate a collaborative and positive approach. The study fills the literature gap investigating the interactions between humans and machines beginning with their historical roots, from Taylorism to digital Taylorism, in relation to an empirical scenario.

Building on previous historical works, this study aims to develop a framework to represent chambers as meta-organizations and present the case of Dersaadet Chamber of Commerce (DCC), based on this framework, during its emergence and evolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the study, a historical narrative was constructed from primary and secondary data. To complement data collected from the archives a systematic content analysis was used to explore the discourse of the chamber within its serial magazine.

It was found that the first chamber of the Ottoman Empire, DCC, was established according to the public law model as an extension of the economic context and the guild order, and it was observed that it increasingly conformed to this model between 1882 and 1929.

In this study, chamber models are examined for the first time according to the designated features of meta-organizational forms, built on the historical work on chambers. The case of DCC suggested that it adopted a public law model and displayed much continuity, even when significant transitions were observed during the modernization process from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic.

In this chapter, the author explains the three components of Trilogy of Taoist Leadership – responsible business, responsible management and responsible leadership. The concepts of business, management and leadership are defined from multiple angles, including an etymological perspective. The historical origins and evolution of these three areas are explored to provide a comprehensive understanding. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the interconnections among the trilogy's components and illustrates how the trilogy can contribute to the development of sustainable organizations.

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 paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.