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The historic turn in organization studies has led to greater appreciation of the potential contribution from historical research. However, there is increasing emphasis on integrating history into organization studies, rather than on recognizing how accommodating history might require a reorientation. As a result, key conceptual and methodological insights from historiography have been overlooked or at times misrepresented. We identify four modes of enquiry that highlight distinctions from history about ‘how to conceptualize’ and ‘how to research’ the past. First, historical organization studies research the past primarily through reference to archival sources. Second, retrospective organizational history reconstructs the past principally from retrospective accounts, such as those generated in oral history. Third, retrospective organizational memory uses ethnography and interviews to explore the role of memory in the present. Fourth, historical organizational memory traces the institutionalization of organizational memory through archival research. From the analysis, we argue that historical organization studies are increasingly established, and interest in ‘uses of the past’ has contributed to the rise of retrospective organizational memory. However, historiographical reflexivity – a new concept for organization studies – focuses attention on engaging with both history and collective memory, and on the distinct methodological choices between archival and retrospective methods.

This article examines the history of British house magazines from 1945 to 2015. It discusses their content, audience and function within companies. From tools of internal public relations, house ma...

Both business historians and organisation studies scholars study institutional change to understand the interactions between business and society. However, research approaches differ fundamentally, with organisational research focusing on theory-driven explanations, whereas historical research is rather theory-informed. The consequence of such disciplinary orientation is that interdisciplinary conversations rarely occur. For this special issue, we invited submissions that address how historical research can contribute to our understanding of institutional change while demonstrating ‘dual integrity’ in terms of being significant pieces of historical research that provide us with new insights into historiography and at the same time addressing important theoretical concerns.

As a synthesis of organization theory and historiography, the field of organizational history is mature enough to contribute to wider theoretical and historiographical debates and is sufficiently developed for a theoretical consideration of its subject matter. In this introduction to the Special Topic Forum on History and Organization Studies, we take up the question, “What is organizational history?” and consider three distinct arguments that we believe frame the next phase of development for historical work within organization studies. First, we argue that following the “historic turn,” organizational history has developed as a subfield of organization studies that takes seriously the matter of history, promoting historical research as a way to enrich the broad endeavor of organization. Second, if “history matters,” then organization theory needs a theoretical account of the past that goes beyond the mere use of history as a context to test or as an example to illustrate theory. Third, the focus on “history that matters” in the present leads to two important considerations: how organizations can use “rhetorical history” as a strategic resource and the need to engage with historiographically significant subjects that connect organization theory to larger humanistic concerns, such as slavery and racism.

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.

Critical management studies scholars occupy a tenuous pos/tlOn in business schools. Their location and intellectual trajectory needs to be understood in the political context of the historical defeat of the Left since its highpoint in 1968. One of the tributaries of critical management studies is labor process theory, which derives from Braverman’s (1974) classic critique of the degradation of labor in capitalist work organization. Whereas Braverman attempted to restore confidence in the potential of the working class to fulfill its Marxist destiny to lead a revolutionary transformation of society, any such confidence in the second coming of communism has long since evaporated from critical management studies. Instead of adhering to Marx’s or Braverman’s historical visions critical management studies scholars have increasingly turned to Foucault or critical theorists such as Adorno or Marcuse, who provide the basis for a deconstruction of Marxian eschatology. This is presented as an intellectual p...

(2000). Marxist Political Economy, Revolutionary Politics, and Labor Process Theory. International Studies of Management & Organization: Vol. 30, The Labor Process Debate, pp. 85-111.

The concept of culture promised to make organization studies more historical and to provide theoretical relevance for business history. This promise has not been fulfilled. The conventions at various levels of organizational culture studies prevent them from becoming more historical, and the conventions of business history make it difficult to engage with the concept of culture. Corporate culturism imposes a narrative structure that privileges the role of founders in history. Similarly, corporate sponsorship reinforces the tendency for business historians to endorse the unity and continuity of corporate cultures. The influence of economics in business history reduces culture to a residual variable and subordinates narrative to economic models. Organizational symbolists are suspicious of narrative, which they associate with founder-centred corporate culturism. Instead, ethnographies emphasize verisimilitude and the subjective experience of the author at the expense of verifiable historical narratives. Business historians adopt an objective stance that allows them to write definitive company histories, but makes it difficult to engage with the subjectivism and relativism of organizational symbolism or the scepticism of post-modernism. Unlike organizational culture studies, post-modernism in history is identified with a return to narrative. A serious engagement with organizational culture studies might engender the much-needed critical reflex in business history. We use the rare examples of historical deconstruction in organizational culture studies (Boje 1995) and of deconstruction in business history (Church 1996) to highlight the differences between the two discourses. We argue that a more historical approach in organizational culture studies and a more reflexive engagement with the concept of culture in business history would facilitate the deconstruction of founder-centred narratives of corporate culture.

In focusing on the relationship between labour process theory and Marxist economics the authors highlight as problematic labour process theorists' abandonment of the labour theory of value and acceptance of managerialism in a way which conflates labour process theory with organisation theory. The similarity in the political rhetoric of the deskilling thesis and the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is brought out, and it is argued neither provides an adequate theoretical basis for revolutionary politics. The challenge for labour process theory is to show the connection between the subordination of labour and capitalist property rights and how those property rights can be dismantled.

This paper offers a defence of Atkinson's model of the flexible firm. It takes issue with two arguments against it: that the model needs to be understood at a political level, as part of a wider `post-industrial' vision; and that the observed increase in flexibility offers the model no support because of its `non-strategic' nature. On the first of these it is argued that flexibility operates on a different level from flexible specialisation and other varieties of `post-industrialism' and that to consider them together confuses rather than illuminates the debate. On the second, it is argued that the criticism relies on an unnecessarily restrictive view of strategy. Rather than being regarded as `plans', strategies should be regarded as `patterns' in decision-making. On the basis of this alternative conception the paper suggests ways in which the flexible firm model might be recast.

The concept of culture promised to make organization studies more historical. This promise has not been fulfilled. Possible reasons for the failure to integrate business history and organization studies are explored and a synthesis developed, using the historical concept of invented tradition in conjunction with the social cognition biases identified by organizational culture. The major part of the article then demonstrates how Cadbury, a British confectionery company well known for its Quaker traditions, invented its corporate culture by attributing significance to the Quaker beliefs of the Cadbury family retrospectively. A history is reconstructed, mainly from published sources, to demonstrate how the histories constructed by the firm, including a centenary celebration in 1931, were part of the process of giving meaning to the firm's labor-management institutions.