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Collaboration has risen up the agenda for archives and universities in recent years, yet there is unrealized potential for co-productive modes of research between archivists and academics, with business collections facing particular obstacles. This article, co-written by an archivist and a historian, presents the findings of a project that aims to support business archivists to develop co-designed research projects that mobilize business collections in rigorous ways to meet present-day business priorities (and so demonstrate to parent organizations the value of their archives and expert archivists). The project involved a collaborative process of workshops, interviews and a survey, which has allowed the project network to develop guidance materials. The authors discuss three key themes that emerged from the process, reflecting the distinctive concerns of archivists working in organizational repositories and the factors that influence their pursuit of academic collaborations. There then follows an analysis of 'mind-set' barriers to collaboration: questions of professional culture and practice or intellectual stance that can influence attitudes to and pursuit of collaborative projects between historians and archivists. The authors argue for an open and dialogic approach to designing collaborative research, acknowledging the constraints and imperatives for archivists and academics and recognizing the complementarity of their expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the context in which firms reflect on their own history in order to help form their organizational identity. By undertaking research in business archives, it shows that external change is as important as an internal transition in understanding shifts in the way an organization understands its past. We trace the messages communicated internally through paintings of past chairmen and senior staff when they were displayed inside the head office of Lloyds Bank during the 1960s and 1970s. These portraits generated interest and were an effective means of non-verbal communication which provoked a discussion about the purpose, values and norms in the firm’s past, present, and future. The objects retold the story of the bank’s success as a privately owned family firm in the midst of on-going political debates inside the Labour party about the nationalization of large banking companies. With the portraits in place, they recognized the bank’s history as a capitalist enterprise. The pictures legitimized the tradition of private ownership, helped to form organizational identity, and set future obligations that would see its continuation in what was a period of potential change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History has long been recognised as a strategic and organisational resource. However, until recently, the advantage conferred by history was attributed to a firm’s ability to accumulate heterogeneous resources or develop opaque practices. In contrast, we argue that the advantage history confers on organisations is based on understanding when the knowledge of the past is referenced and the reasons why it is strategically communicated. We argue that managers package this knowledge in historical narratives to address particular organisational concerns and audiences. As well, we show that different historical narratives are produced with the goal of achieving different organisational outcomes. The success of an organisation is thus dependent on the ability of its managers to skilfully develop historical narratives that create a strategic advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops an ethnographic account of the development and history of the British Airways Heritage Centre (BAHC). Responding to several observations throughout the literature, we report on our experiences of engagement with British Airways’ archives over a 25-year period. In doing so our focus is on the much-neglected history of archives as powerful influences on how corporate histories are written. The ethnographic account is rooted in ANTi-History, an approach to historiography, that focuses on the production of history as knowledge of the past by following a number of human (e.g. archive volunteers) and non-human (e.g. airline artefacts) actors to reassemble the elements that constitute an archive at a point in time. To that end, we trace the inter-relationships between histories of British Airways and the development of the BAHC. We conclude that a focus on the various human and non-human relationships that constitute an archive can help the researcher to identify the hidden influences on the production of history that can otherwise serve to enrol him or her. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reflects on the papers published in the Symposium on 'Counterfactual History in Management and Organizations'. After describing the background to the symposium we review some important themes in the multidisciplinary domain of counterfactuals. We discuss each of the papers published in the symposium and set out our views on future directions for counterfactual history in the management and organization studies discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discuses various reports published within the issue, including one by Kyle Bruce and Judith Jordan that classify and characterize hybrid organizational forms and another by Mario Morroni that explores the conditions that interact in determining organizational boundaries.

The successful management of strategic change requires an understanding of which moves are possible in specific contexts, and thus of how specific contexts variously require, forbid, or permit certain organizational or policy actions. Appreciation of such modal issues of necessity and possibility thus becomes essential in understanding organizational and technological dynamics. This paper introduces the concept of modal narratives: forms of analytically structured narrative that explore questions of necessity, possibility and contingency. After a brief review of two common types of modal narrative—counterfactuals and scenarios— the potential of a third form is suggested: the superfactual. An extended example of a superfactual is provided in the Project Hindsight case, and the implications for strategic action are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]