Clio in the business school: Historical approaches in strategy, international business and entrepreneurship

Abstract

On the back of recent and significant new debates on the use of history within business and management studies, we consider the perception of historians as being anti-theory and of having methodological shortcomings; and business and management scholars displaying insufficient attention to historical context and privileging of certain social science methods over others. These are explored through an examination of three subjects: strategy, international business and entrepreneurship. We propose a framework for advancing the use of history within business and management studies more generally through greater understanding of historical perspectives and methodologies.

Keywords:

• History
• strategy
• international business
• entrepreneurship
• methodology

Acknowledgements:

The authors wish to thank the audiences and commentators at the European Group for Organizational Studies 2014 and the 2013 Higher Education Academy History conferences for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Aldrich, “The Emergence of Entrepreneurship,” 1241; Wadhwani, “Entrepreneurship in Historical Context.”

2. Forbes and Kirsch, “The Study of Emerging Industries,” 589.

3. Jones and Khanna, “Bringing History (Back).”

4. Buckley, “Business History and International Business.”

5. Ibid., 326.

6. Jones and Khanna, “Bringing History (Back),” 309.

7. Ericson and Melin, “Strategizing and History”; Carter et al. “So!apbox”; Jarzabkowski and Spee, “Strategy-as-Practice”; Kornberger, “Disciplining the Future,” 104.

8. Chia and MacKay, “Post-processual Challenges,” 226; http://www.strategy-as-practice.org/

9. Vaara and Lamberg, “Taking Historical Embeddedness Seriously,” 4.

10. Mintzberg and Waters, “Of Strategies”; Chia and Holt, Strategy Without Design; Clegg et al., Strategy; Rumelt et al., Fundamental Issues in Strategy; For a different engagement between business history and strategy, see Kipping and Cailluet, “Mintzberg’s Emergent and Deliberate Strategies.” This is also unusual in that it mentions Mintzberg and Water’s ‘emergent’ and ‘deliberate’ strategy . It is also currently amongst the most read article in Business History Review.

11. Sullivan and Graham, “Guest Editors' Introduction”; Burgelman, “Bridging History and Reductionism”; Decker, “The Silence of the Archives”; Bucheli and Wadhwani, Organizations in Time; Kipping and Üsdiken, “History in Organization and Management Theory”; Rowlinson et al., “Research Strategies for Organizational History”; Maclean et al., “Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies”; Vaara and Lamberg, “Taking Historical Embeddedness Seriously”; Decker et al., “New Business Histories!”; Foster et al., “The Strategic Use of Historical Narratives.”

12. Jones et al., “The Future of Economic, Social, and Business History’.

13. Rosenbloom, “Business History and Management Theory: An Introduction.”

14. Morck and Yeung, “History in Perspective.”

15. Burgelman, “Bridging History and Reductionism.”

16. Aldrich, “The Emergence of Entrepreneurship,” 1241.

17. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 2016.

18. The first entrepreneurship research centre was established by Arthur Cole, with support from Joseph Schumpeter, as the Center for Research on Entrepreneurial History at Harvard in 1948.

19. Morck and Yeung, “History in Perspective,” 11.

20. Decker, “The Silence of the Archives.”

21. Rowlinson et al., “Research Strategies for Organizational History.”

22. Kipping and Üsdiken, “History in Organization and Management Theory,” 535.

23. Maclean et al., “Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies.”

24. Ibid; Greenwood and Bernardi, “Understanding the Rift.”

25. Suddaby, “What Grounded Theory is Not.”

26. Duara , “Why is History Antitheoretical?,” 106.

27. Lorenz, “Philosophy of History,” 16.

28. The literature on each one of these areas of debate is voluminous and far too extensive to quote in full here. For overviews of these debates published in the last three decades: Green and Troup, The Houses of History; Brown, Postmodernism for Historians; Dworkin, Class Struggles; Laura Lee Downs, Writing Gender History.

29. Strati, Theory and Method in Organization Studies, 133–134.

30. Maclean et al., “Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies,” 6.

31. Ibid, 7.

32. Gaddis, The Landscape of History, xi.

33. Greenwood and Bernardi, “Understanding the Rift,” 4.

34. Gaddis, The Landscape of History, xi. Fellman and Popp make a similar point in “Lost in the Archive: The Business Historian in Distress.’

35. Berridge and Stewart, “History,” 51; Sullivan and Graham, “Guest Editors' Introduction.”

36. Decker, “The Silence of the Archives,” 2.

37. Hargadon and Douglas. “When Innovations Meet Institutions,” 481.

38. Berridge and Stewart, “History,” 51.

39. Jones et al., “The Future of Economic, Social, and Business History,” 230; Leblebici, “History and Organization Theory.”

40. Eisenhardt, “Building Theories from Case Study Research”; Yin, “Case Study Research: Design and Methods.”

41. Aldcroft, “The Entrepreneur and the British Economy”; Aldcroft, “Technical Progress and British Enterprise”; McCloskey and Sandberg, “From Damnation to Redemption.” On the narrative of British declinism: Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline.

42. McCloskey and Sandberg, 1971–2 quoted in Harvey, “Business History and the Problem of Entrepreneurship,” 4.

43. Carr, What is History?, 12.

44. Ibid., 5.

45. Lazonick, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy. 304.

46. Maclean et al., “Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies”; Lipartito, “Historical Sources and Data”; Yates, “Understanding Historical Methods in Organization Studies.”

47. Woolcock et al., “How and Why History Matters for Development Policy”; Berridge and Stewart, “History: A Social Science Neglected by Other Social Sciences.”

48. Bryant and Hall, “Towards Integration and Unity in the Human Sciences,” i.

49. Gareth Stedman Jones, “From Historical Sociology to Theoretical History”; Abrams, Historical Sociology; For a recent discussion, Greenwood and Bernardi, “Understanding the Rift.”

50. Birkinshaw, “Publishing Qualitative Research in International Business”; Marschan-Piekkari and Welch, Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for International Business; Piekkari and Welch, Rethinking the Case Study in International Business and Management Research.

51. Mills and Helms Mills, “Digging Archaeology.”

52. Booth, “Does History Matter?,” 103.

53. Vaara and Lamberg, “Taking Historical Embeddedness Seriously” [advance access].

54. Ericson and Melin, “Strategizing and History”; Carter et al., “So!apbox”; Jarzabkowski and Spee, “Strategy-as-Practice”; Kornberger, “Disciplining the Future,” 104.

55. Kornberger, “Clausewitz.”

56. Chia and Holt, Strategy Without Design, 161.

57. Vaara and Lamberg, “Taking Historical Embeddedness Seriously,” 4.

58. Ibid., 4, 6, 10.

59. Ibid., 14, 22–23; Kipping and Cailluet, “Mintzberg’s Emergent and Deliberate Strategies”; Popp and Holt, “The Presence of Entrepreneurial Opportunity”; Popp, Entrepreneurial Families; Popp, “The Broken Cotton Speculator.”

60. Tripsas, “Unraveling the Process of Creative Destruction.”

61. Teece, “Alfred Chandler and ‘Capabilities’”; See, for example, Scranton.

62. Danneels, “Trying to Become a Different Type of Company.”

63. Buckley, “Business History and International Business,” 318.

64. Jones et al., “The Future of Economic, Business, and Social History,” 234.

65. Ibid., 232.

66. Fruin, “Bringing the World (Back) into International Business.”

67. Bucheli, “Multinational Corporations, Totalitarian Regimes and Economic Nationalism”; Murillo, “'The Devil We Know'”; Van den Bersselaar, “Who Belongs to the 'Star People'”; Yacob, “Ford's Investment in Colonial Malaya, 1926–1957”; White, British Business in Postcolonial Malaya; Maurer, The Empire Trap; Austin, “History, Archives and Development Policy in Africa.”

68. On the scientistic turn in US business research and education in the late 1950s, see Usdiken and Kipping, “History and Organization Studies: A Long-term View”, 37–38. For an explicit statement about the need for “an emphasis upon current and immediately observable organizations in the interests of full and rigorous data”, implying that “historical research, while not ruled out, is given second-level priority and rigorous comparative studies substituted at the first-priority level”, see Delany, “Some Field Notes on the Problem of Access,” 449."

69. Maclean et al., “Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies.”

70. Jordanova, History in Practice, 85–86; See Carr, What is History?

71. For classic historical work on the ‘cultural circuit’ see Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories; On ‘intersubjectivity’: Lummis, “Structure and Validity in Oral History”; Summerfield, “Dis/composing the Subject: Intersubjectivities in Oral History”; Pollock, Remembering.

72. See, for example: “This much I know: Niall Ferguson,” The Guardian, 18 January 2009.

73. Strangleman and Warren, Studying Work, 52.

74. Jones and Khanna, “Bringing History (Back)”; Fear, “Mining the Past.”

75. Fear, “Mining the Past,” 170–171.

76. Andrews and Burke, “What Does it Mean to Think Historically.”

77. Decker, “Mothership Reconnection.”

78. Andrews and Burke, “What Does it Mean to Think Historically.”

79. Gaddis, The Landscape of History; Maclean et al., “Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies.”

80. Harvey et al., “Andrew Carnegie”; Maclean et al., “Storytelling”; Shaw et al., “Exploring Contemporary Entrepreneurial Philanthropy”; Shaw et al., “Exploring Contemporary Entrepreneurial Philanthropy”; Bishop and Green, Philanthrocapitalism.

81. Kipping and Cailluet, “Mintzberg’s Emergent and Deliberate Strategies”; Popp, Entrepreneurial Families and “The Broken Cotton Speculator”; Jones and Lubinski, “Managing Political Risk.”

82. Peng et al., “The Institution-based View,” 64.

83. Jones and Khanna, “Bringing History (Back)”; Gourvish, “British Business and the Transition to a Corporate Economy.”

84. Burt et al., “Managerial Hyperopia,” 3.

85. Despite Terry Gourvish’s identification of ‘bounded rationality’ as an area worthy of exploration over 20 years ago, this has been little explored in business history: Gourvish, “British Business and the Transition to a Corporate Economy,” 18–19; See also Burt et al., “Managerial Hyperopia”; Levinthal and March, “The Myopia of Learning”; Chikudate, “Collective Hyperopia”; Vaughan, “The Dark Side of Organizations.”

86. Aldrich, “The Emergence of Entrepreneurship”; Coraiola et al., “Varieties of History in Organizational Studies”; Booth and Rowlinson, “Management and Organizational History”; Clark and Rowlinson, “The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies”; Rowlinson et al., “Narratives and Memory in Organizations”; Rowlinson et al., “Research Strategies for Organizational History”; Kieser, “Why Organization Theory Needs Historical Analyses”; Üsdiken and Kieser, “Introduction: History in Organisation Studies”; Kipping and Üsdiken, “History in Organization and Management Theory”; Bucheli and Wadhwani, Organizations in Time.

87. Decker, Kipping and Wadhwani, “New Business Histories!”

88. Roy Suddaby at the Business History Conference in 2011. Jones et al., “The Future of Economic, Business, and Social History.”

89. Lipartito, “Historical Sources and Data”; Yates, “Understanding Historical Methods in Organization Studies.”