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Organizations remember through narratives and storytelling. The articles in this Special Issue explore the interface between organization studies, memory studies, and historiography. They focus on the practices for organizational remembering. Taken together, the articles explore the similarities and differences between ethnographic and historical methods for studying memory in organizations, which represents a contribution to the historic turn in organization studies.

The ABS list is one of the most widely used journal quality lists available. It is pluralistic and comprehensive, and is widely seen as capturing the consensus in relation to journal ratings. As editors of the ABS list we are concerned at recent calls for a moratorium, or even the abolition of journal quality lists. These calls reinforce the elitist view that the tacit knowledge of where to publish should not be made explicit in lists.

How is it that a collection of working class drifters, sociology graduates, and ex-leftist politicos have ended up teaching in UK business schools? Understanding the predicament of these ‘critters’ helps to explain the ironic contingencies that provide the conditions of possibility for institutionalizing critical management studies (CMS), in particular the historic ‘defeat of the Left’ and the lack of more practical activities for radical management academics. Unlike labour process theory (LPT), CMS has come to terms with its institutional location within business schools and has taken the opportunity provided by the continued expansion of research oriented UK business schools to institutionalize itself as a recognized business school constituency. This has even led to the creation of one or two critically oriented business schools in the UK, where the contradictions of CMS are played out. One such contradiction is that having provided an opening for a wider academic and leftist intellectual community to enter the business school, CMS now finds itself faced with an autonomist critique which insists that the mainstream management curriculum is ‘worthless’ and calls for nothing less than the abolition of business schools. Consideration of this critique provides an opportunity to explore the identity of critters and the cultural performativity of CMS in providing a sign for their disaffiliation from the business school.

In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault describes how: `From the seventeenth century to the introduction, at the beginning of the nineteenth, of the Lancaster method, the complex clockwork of the mutual improvement school was built up cog by cog' (emphasis added). Foucault's genealogical explanation of how the mutual improvement school became a `machine for learning' is one of the main examples upon which his thesis of `disciplinary power' is built. However, Foucault's methodology, presenting a `genealogy' of the `essential techniques' on which disciplinary institutions are built, rather than to `write the history' of those institutions, results in relatively little case evidence being presented on key organizations cited in empirical support of his thesis. For example, by suggesting that the Lancaster Method represents the logical conclusion to the genealogy of mutual improvement techniques, he fails to offer any formal case evidence of Lancasterian policies and practices. This article therefore seeks to `research Foucault's research' by uncovering the distinctive organizational features of this paradigm `disciplinary institution', the Lancaster Method. We develop a case analysis of the educational philosophies of Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838) and explain how these were realized in the pedagogy and administration of his `monitorial' (or `British') schools. In so doing, we seek to deepen our understanding of `the architecture, anatomy, mechanics [and] economy of the disciplinary body'.

There is an increasing call for an historical perspective in organization studies. Clegg, Jacques and Burrell in particular combine this call with a Foucauldian reformulation of organization studies. But Foucauldians in organization studies have largely ignored the criticisms of Foucault from historians. We rehearse six main criticisms of Foucault from historians: (1) impenetrable style; (2) avoidance of narrative; (3) ambivalence to truth; (4) errors in historical facts; (5) neglect of relevant historiography; and (6) questionable historical explanations. We then apply these criticisms to the work of Clegg, Jacques, and Burrell. Clegg makes serious historical errors, and neglects criticisms of labour process historiography. The historical sources and historiography cited by Jacques are insufficient. Burrell's interpretation of the connection between modernity and the Holocaust is questionable in the light of recent historiography. We conclude that so far, the invocation of Foucault has exacerbated the problematic treatment of history in organization studies.