The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an ‘Historic Turn’?

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Notes

The authors would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Alfred Kieser and Behlül Üsdiken, for organising the sub-theme on ‘Re-discovering History in Organizations’ at the EGOS Colloquium in Lyon 2001, and for their help in developing this article.

T.J. McDonald (ed.), ‘Introduction’, The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Michigan, 1996), pp.1–2.

B. Fay, ‘The Linguistic Turn and Beyond in Contemporary Theory of History’, introduction to B. Fay, P. Pomper and R.T. Vann (eds.), History and Theory: Contemporary Readings (Oxford, 1998).

Fay, ‘The Linguistic Turn’, p.2.

McDonald, The Historic Turn, pp.1–2.

W.G. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1967), p.16, quoted in A. Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1995), p.4; see also Hegel, quoted in H. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD, 1987), pp.11–12.

M. Rowlinson, ‘Business History and Organization Theory’, Journal of Industrial History, Vol.4 (2001), pp.1–23; S. Procter and M. Rowlinson, ‘The Culture of Business History and the History of Business Culture’, in T. Slaven (ed.), Business History, Theory and Practice (Glasgow, 2000), pp.45–57.

For conferences of business historians addressing theory, see P. Scranton and R. Horowitz, ‘“The Future for Business History”: An Introduction’, Business and Economic History, Vol.26 No.2 (1997), pp.1–4; Slaven (ed.), Business History, Theory and Practice.

L. Hannah, ‘Entrepreneurs and the Social Sciences’, Economica, Vol.51 (1984), p.219; Slaven (ed.), Business History, Theory and Practice.

G. Jones, ‘Company History and Business History in the 1990s’, European Yearbook of Business History, Vol.2 (1999), p.14. See also A. Kransdorff, Corporate Amnesia: Keeping Know-How in the Company (Oxford, 1998).

Interdisciplinary debate: P. Clark, Organisations in Action: Competition between Contexts (London, 2000); M. Rowlinson, Organisations and Institutions: Perspectives in Economics and Sociology (London, 1997). Archival research: M. Rowlinson, ‘The Early Application of Scientific Management by Cadbury’, Business History, Vol.30 (1988), pp.377–95; C. Smith, J. Child and M. Rowlinson, Reshaping Work: The Cadbury Experience (Cambridge, 1990); R. Whipp and P. Clark, Innovation and the Auto Industry: Product, Process and Work Organization (London, 1986); M. Rowlinson, ‘Historical Analysis of Company Documentation’, in C. Cassell and G. Symon (eds.), Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research (forthcoming). Theoretically informed history: M. Rowlinson, ‘Public History Review Essay: Cadbury World’, Labour History Review, Vol.67 (2002), pp.101–19.

A. Kieser, ‘Why Organization Theory Needs Historical Analyses – and How This Should be Performed’, Organization Science, Vol.5 (1994), pp.608–20; M.N. Zald, ‘Organization Studies as Scientific and Humanistic Enterprise: Toward a Reconceptualization of the Foundations of the Field’, Organization Science, Vol.4 (1993), pp.513–28; R. Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee: Management Knowledge from the 19 ^th to 21 ^st Centuries (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1996); G. Burrell, Pandemonium: Towards a Retro-Organization Theory (London, 1997).

Kieser, ‘Why Organization Theory’, p.617.

P. Goldman, ‘Searching for History in Organizational Theory: Comment on Kieser’, Organization Science, Vol.5 (1994), p.623.

M.N. Zald, ‘Spinning Disciplines: Critical Management Studies in the Context of the Transformation of Management Education’, Organization, Vol.9 (2002), p.381.

Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee, pp.9, 190.

Burrell, Pandemonium, pp.27; [s]←[/s]185.

M. Rowlinson and C. Carter, ‘Foucault and History in Organization Studies’, Organization, Vol.9 (2002), pp.527–47.

Zald, ‘Spinning Disciplines’, p.375.

Kieser, ‘Why Organization Theory’, p.611.

For example, see L. Donaldson, For Positivist Organization Theory (London, 1996), pp.170–71.

N. Ferguson, ‘Virtual History: Towards a “Chaotic” Theory of the Past’, in N. Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London, 1997), p.52.

M. Almond, ‘Without Gorbachev: What If Communism had not Collapsed?’, in Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History, pp.392–3

Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, p.89.

White, Content of the Form, pp.xi, 25.

S. Clegg, in ‘A Dialogue, Part 1’, with J.M. Jermier, ‘Critical Issues in Organization Science’, in P.J. Frost, A.Y. Lewin and R.L. Daft (eds.), Talking About Organization Science (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2000), p.209.

Burrell, Pandemonium, p.190.

T.J. Peters and R.H. Waterman, In Search of Excellence (New York, 1982), pp.258–9.

T. Deal and A. Kennedy, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (1982), pp.7–8.

R.T. Delamarter, Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power (London, 1986). For a review of corporate culture and history, see M. Rowlinson and S. Procter, ‘Organizational Culture and Business History’, Organization Studies, Vol.20 No.3 (1999), pp.369–96.

C. Perrow, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (New York, 3rd edn. 1986), pp.52, 111 n.91.

S. Gupta, Corporate Capitalism and Political Philosophy (London, 2002), p.112.

Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee, p.14.

F.N. Brady, ‘Finding a History for Management’, Journal of Management Inquiry, Vol.6 (1997), pp.160–67.

B. Cooke, ‘Writing the Left Out of Management Theory: The Historiography of the Management of Change’, Organization, Vol.6 (1999), pp.81–105.

Kieser, ‘Why Organization Theory’.

A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, 1986).

Gupta, Corporate Capitalism, p.106.

W. Naumes and M.J. Naumes, The Art and Craft of Case Writing (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1999), p.15.

A.P. Norman, ‘Telling Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms’, in Fay et al. (eds.), History and Theory, p.155.

Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee, p.155.

Gupta, Corporate Capitalism, p.105.

S. Best, The Politics of Historical Vision: Marx, Foucault, Habermas (New York, 1995), p.11.

Referring to the social sciences in general, T.J. McDonald, ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about History: The Conversations of History and Sociology’, in McDonald (ed.), Historic Turn, p.111.

L. Hannah, ‘Introduction’, in L. Hannah (ed.), Management Strategy and Business Development (London, 1976), p.6.

See, for example, A.A. Alchian, ‘Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory’, Journal of Political Economy, Vol.58 (1950), pp.211–21.

N.R. Lamoreaux, D.M.G. Raff and P. Temin, ‘New Economic Approaches to the Study of Business History’, Business and Economic History, Vol.26 (1997), pp.57–79.

A.D. Chandler, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, MA, 1962).

J.B. Barney, and W. Hesterly, ‘Organizational Economics: Understanding the Relationship between Organizations and Economic Analysis’, in S.R. Clegg and C. Hardy (eds.), Studying Organization: Theory and Method (London, 1999), p.114.

W.G. Roy ‘Functional and Historical Logics in Explaining the Rise of the American Industrial Corporation’, Comparative Social Research, Vol.12 (1990), p.20.

P. Ghemawat, book review, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol.38 (2000), pp.419–20.

M. Zey, Rational Choice Theory and Organizational Theory: A Critique (London, 1998), pp.28–9.

O.E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications (New York, 1983), pp.20–21.

See, for example, Perrow, Complex Organizations.

P. Milgrom and J. Roberts, Economics, Organization and Management (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1992), p.25.

P. Marginson, ‘Power and Efficiency in the Firm: Understanding the Employment Relationship’, in C. Pitelis (ed.), Transaction Costs, Markets and Hierarchies (Oxford, 1993), pp.142, 150.

O.E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting (New York, 1985), p.324.

Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies, p.171.

Kieser, ‘Why Organization Theory’.

S.R.H. Jones, ‘Transaction Costs and the Theory of the Firm: The Scope and Limitations of the New Institutional Approach’, Business History, Vol.29 (1997), pp.9–25.

R. Swedberg and M. Granovetter (eds.), ‘Introduction’, The Sociology of Economic Life (Oxford, 1992), p.15.

D.N. McCloskey, Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge, 1994), p.115.

N. Fligstein, The Transformation of Corporate Control (London, 1990), p.300.

McCloskey, Knowledge and Persuasion, p.395.

P.M. Hirsch and M.D. Lounsbury, ‘Recovering Volition: The Institutional Economics of Douglass C. North’, Academy of Management Review, Vol.21 (1996), p.879.

D.C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1990), pp.7, 58–9.

D.C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York, 1981), quoted by B. Gustafsson, ‘Introduction’, in B. Gustafsson (ed.), Power and Economic Institutions: Reinterpretations in Economic History (Aldershot, 1991), p.27.

Hirsch and Lounsbury, ‘Recovering Volition’.

R.H. Coase, The Firm, the Market and the Law (London, 1990).

H. Demsetz, Ownership, Control and the Firm: The Organization of Economic Activity (Oxford, 1988), Vol.1, p.23.

Hirsch and Lounsbury, ‘Recovering Volition’.

North, Institutions, p.9.

D.N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Brighton, 1986), p.114.

North, Institutions, p.7.

R.R. Nelson and S.G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, MA, 1982), p.382.

D. Rueschemeyer, Power and the Division of Labour (Cambridge, 1986), p.45.

See, for example, Barney and Hesterley, ‘Organizational Economics’.

H. Demsetz, Efficiency, Competition, and Policy: The Organization of Economic Activity (Oxford, 1991), Vol.2, p.46.

S.G. Winter, ‘On Coase, Competence, and the Corporation’, in O.E. Williamson and S.G. Winter (eds.), The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution and Development (Oxford, 1993), p.186.

Nelson and Winter, An Evolutionary Theory, pp.14–18.

Winter, ‘On Coase’, p.191.

Jones, ‘Transaction Costs’, p.19.

S.K. Sanderson, Social Evolutionism: A Critical History (Oxford, 1990), pp.212–13.

Giddens Constitution of Society, pp.xxviii–xxix, 236–43.

See, for example, Barney and Hesterley, ‘Organizational Economics’, pp.124, 127.

Alchian, ‘Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory’.

Nelson and Winter, Evolutionary Theory, p.41.

E.T. Penrose, ‘Biological Analogies in the Theory of the Firm’, American Economic Review, Vol.42 (1952), pp.808–12.

P.A. David, ‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’, American Economic Review, Vol.75 (1985), pp.332–7. For a response to path dependence disputing the inefficiency of QWERTY, see O.E. Williamson, ‘Transaction Cost Economics and Organization Theory’, in O.E. Williamson (ed.), Organization Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and Beyond (Oxford, expanded edn. 1995), pp.236–40.

W.B. Arthur, ‘Competing Technologies and Lock-In by Historical Small Events’, Economic Journal, Vol.99 (1989), pp.116–31.

See, for example, Barney and Hesterley, ‘Organizational Economics’, p.129.

McCloskey, Knowledge and Persuasion, p.391.

See, for example, Barney and Hesterley, ‘Organizational Economics’, p.136.

Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, pp.18–19.

H. Scarbrough, ‘Path(ological) Dependency? Core Competences from an Organizational Perspective’, British Journal of Management, Vol.9 (1998), pp.219–32.

D.N. McCloskey, If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (London, 1990), p.22. For a perceptive critique of path dependence in relation to counterfactuals, see C. Booth, ‘Does History Matter in Organizations? The Possibilities and Problems of Counterfactual Analysis’, Management Decision, forthcoming.

L. Donaldson, ‘The Normal Science of Structural Contingency Theory’, in Clegg and Hardy (eds.), Studying Organization.

J. Child, ‘Organizational Structure, Environment and Performance: The Role of Strategic Choice’, Sociology, Vol.6 (1972), pp.1–22.

S.R. Clegg, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, Organization Studies, Vol.9 No.1 (1988), pp.7–13, quoted in R. Marsden and B. Townley, ‘The Owl of Minerva: Reflections on Theory in Practice’, in Clegg and Hardy (eds.), Studying Organization, p.417.

D.S. Pugh and D.J. Hickson, Writers on Organizations (London, 5th edn. 1996); D.J. Hickson and D.S. Pugh, Management Worldwide (London, 1995), relies on Hofstede for its theoretical framework.

G. Hofstede, Cultures Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions and Organisations (London, 2nd edn. 2001), pp.375–6, 119.

M.T. Hannan and J. Freeman, Organizational Ecology (London, 1989), p.40.

Ibid., p.40.

Ibid., p.43.

J.A.C. Baum, ‘Organizational Ecology’, in Clegg and Hardy (eds.), Studying Organization, p.88.

Baum, ‘Organizational Ecology’, p.101.

C.f. G. Gurvitch, The Spectrum of Social Time (Dordrecht, 1964).

Baum, ‘Organizational Ecology’, p.101.

P.M. Hirsch and M. Lounsbury, ‘Putting the Organization Back Into Organization Theory: Action, Change and the “New” Institutionalism’, Journal of Management Inquiry, Vol.6 (1997), p.79.

P.J. DiMaggio, ‘Comments on “What Theory is Not” ’, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol.40 (1995), pp.391–7.

Hirsch and Lounsbury, ‘Putting the Organization Back’, p.80.

M.T. Dacin, J. Goodstein and W.R. Scott, ‘Institutional Theory and Institutional Change: Introduction to the Special Research Forum’, Academy of Management Journal, Vol.45 (2002), pp.45–57.

W.R. Scott, Institutions and Organizations (London, 2nd edn. 2001), p.94.

H. Aldrich, Organizations Evolving (London, 1999), pp.201–22.

A. Abbott, ‘From Causes to Events: “Notes on Narrative Positivism’ ”, Sociological Methods and Research, Vol.20 (1992), p.429.

Aldrich, Organizations, p.207.

Abbott, ‘From Causes’, p.434.

P.S. Tolbert and L. Zucker, ‘The Insitutionalization of Institutional Theory’, in Clegg and Hardy (eds.), Studying Organization, p.170.

See, for example, P.J. Dimaggio and W.W. Powell, ‘The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields’, in W.W. Powell and P.J. DiMaggio (eds.), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (London, 1991).

H. Prechel, Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s–1990s (New York, 2000), p.271.

Giddens, Constitution of Society, p.205.

See, for example, R.B. DuBoff and E.S. Herman, ‘Alfred Chandler's New Business History: A Review’, Politics and Society, Vol.10 (1980), pp.87–110; Roy, ‘Functional and Historical Logics’.

W.R. Nord, ‘Can Organizational Culture be Managed?’, in P.J. Frost, L.F. Moore, M.R. Louis, C.C. Lundberg and J. Martin (eds.), Organizational Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1985); K. Lipartito, ‘Culture and the Practise of Business History’, Business and Economic History, Vol.24 (1995), pp.1–41.

H.M. Trice, and J.M. Beyer, The Cultures of Work Organizations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993), p.6.

J. Martin, and P. Frost, ‘The Organizational Culture War Games: A Struggle for Intellectual Dominance’, in Clegg and Hardy (eds.), Studying Organization, p.349.

M. Alvesson, Cultural Perspectives on Organizations (Cambridge, 1993).

M. Alvesson and P.O. Berg, Corporate Culture and Organizational Symbolism (Berlin, 1992), p.61; J. Martin, S.B. Sitkin and M. Boehm, ‘Founders and the Elusiveness of a Cultural Legacy’, in Frost et al. (eds.), Organizational Culture, p.103.

J. Martin, Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives (Oxford, 1992), p.25.

Norman, ‘Telling Like It Was’, pp.156, 167.

Trice and Beyer, Cultures of Work Organizations, p.6.

J. Van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (London, 1988), p.72.

See, for example, Martin, Cultures in Organizations.

M. Schultz, On Studying Organizational Cultures (Berlin, 1995), p.19.

Van Maanen, Tales of the Field, p.65.

B. Czarniawska, Writing Management: Organization Theory as a Literary Genre (Oxford, 1999), p.38.

J.H. Hexter, ‘The Rhetoric of History’, in Fay et al. (eds.), History and Theory, p.60.

Rowlinson and Carter, ‘Foucault, Management and History’, p.532.

A.M. Pettigrew, ‘On Studying Organizational Cultures’, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol.24 (1979), pp.570–81; A.M. Pettigrew, The Awakening Giant: Continuity and Change in Imperial Chemical Industries (Oxford, 1985); Alvesson and Berg, Corporate Culture, p.15; Coleman, ‘Uses and Abuses’, pp.152–3.

A. Langley, ‘Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data’, Academy of Management Review, Vol.24 (1999).

P. Clark and M. Rowlinson, ‘Time and Narrative History in Organization Theory: Charting Historical Narratives’ (unpublished conference paper, Academy of Management, Organization and Management Theory Division, Denver, 2002).

A.H. Van deVen, ‘Suggestions for Studying Strategy Process: A Research Note’, Strategic Management Journal, Vol.13 (1992), p.181.

Czarniawska, Writing Management.

D.M. Boje, ‘Stories of the Story Telling Organization: A Postmodern Analysis of Disney as “Tamara-land”’, Academy of Management Journal, Vol.38 (1995), pp.997–1035; D.M. Boje, Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research (London, 2001).

Abbott, ‘From Causes to Events’, pp.428–9.

Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee.

As demonstrated in Perrow's recent masterful synthesis and critique; C. Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Princeton, NJ, 2002).

See, for example, C. Kaysen (ed.), The American Corporation Today: Examining the Questions of Power and Efficiency at the Century's End (Oxford, 1996).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Clark

The authors would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Alfred Kieser and Behlül Üsdiken, for organising the sub-theme on ‘Re-discovering History in Organizations’ at the EGOS Colloquium in Lyon 2001, and for their help in developing this article.