Performing Pan American Airways through coloniality: an ANTi-History approach to narratives and business history

Abstract

This paper centers on the role of narratives in business history from an ANTi-History perspective. We focus on the networked processes through which narratives are told of, for, and by multi-national companies embed the development of ‘new imperialism’ and coloniality. We set out to achieve this through a discussion and application of ANTi-History to a study of Pan American Airways and particularly its performance as a maturing multi-national company and its relationship to postcoloniality. In the process, we also hope to contribute to recent calls in business history for more explicit accounts of the methods used in the development of historical accounts. We are concerned to encourage ‘a narrative turn in business history’ but also to do so critically, i.e. to reveal some of the strengths and limitations of a narrative turn. We conclude with reflections on the relationship between methods and the production of (business) history.

Keywords:

• ANTi-History
• narratives
• business history
• Pan American Airways
• postcolonialism
• multi-national companies

Notes

1. For Roland Barthes narrative ‘is simply there like life itself … international, transhistorical, transcultural’ – quoted in White (1987, 1).

2. For a complete overview of ANTi-History and its application to business history see Durepos and Mills (2012), Mills and Durepos (2010), Hartt et al. (2017), and Durepos and Mills (2017).

3. We use the terms ‘more or less’ and ‘ultimate’ advisedly to make clear that modernist historians are clearly aware of the problems of representation from the various influences (e.g. the specific character of an archive) on the reproduction of historical events and people.

4. There is something of a debate in the social sciences and humanities about the difference between postmodernist and poststructuralist accounts. Some argue that the latter is a sub-set of the former – e.g. Eriksson and Kovalainen (2008), while others argue that there are distinct differences – e.g. Prasad (2005). For our purposes here we view the two as variations of the same approach.

5. This is not to suggest that postmodernists are uninterested in the factual detail of a given work but rather how such facts might contribute to a particular discourse. For example, it is argued that Juan Trippe avoided using his first name for concern that he might be taken for a Latino (Daley 1980). If that is factually correct it provides insights into a certain form of racist discourse that was circulating in the airline at the time: Betty Trippe’s (1996) diary seems to confirm such a way of thinking. However, the fact that this story was circulating in 1980 provides the postmodernist historian was evidence of current thinking at the time of the book’s publication.

6. Munslow (2010).

7. Munslow (2010) refers to this conflation of the past as history as ‘the-past-as-history’.

8. This is not to say that amodernists (or postmodernists for that matter) ignore factual elements but rather that the notion of what counts as factual is contested. It is not, for example, disputed that Juan Trippe helped to found Pan American Airways so much as why historical accounts choose to focus on Trippe and what they make of that starting point.

9. Ibid.

10. In particular the work of Latour (2005), Law (1994), and Callon (1999).

11. The term non-corporeal actant comes from Hartt (2013)

12. Here we, respectively, distinguish between the professionally trained historian and those without specific training in history who, nonetheless, set out to write historical accounts of people and events. We imply no judgement in the distinction.

13. Recent attempts to develop ANT approaches to historical developments have compounded this problem. See, for example, the otherwise excellent work of Bruce and Nyland (2011)

14. See Myrick, Mills, and Mills (2013). Secord and Corrigan (2015) refer to this as nesting, i.e. layers of historical knowledge embedded within extant knowledge.

15. Kuhn (1962) captures something of this in the formation and eventual breakdown of paradigmatic communities of thought.

16. White (1987) argues that the production of meaning through narration can be regarded as a performance, because any given set of real events can be emploted in a number of ways, and can thus bear the weight of being told as any number of different kinds of stories (44). In this statement we can also see evidence of the plural approach discussed above.

17. White (1973) makes the point that there are a limited number of narrative forms and styles that influence the writing of history.

18. Bender and Altschul (1982), The Chosen Instrument; Daley (1980), An American Saga; Josephson (1943), Empire of the Air.

19. From a realist perspective similar accounts may be evidence of the truthful character of what is depicted. From our perspective it can be taken as the reproduction of dominant stories from networks of actors associated with Pan over the years.

20. Here we are referring to The Pan American World Airways Collection 341, Otto Richter Library, University of Miami.

21. In some quarters this translated into pro-Nazi sentiments – see Wallace (2003).

22. For a full account of the events described see Durepos, Mills, and Mills (2008)

23. These are, respectively, Josephson, Empire of the Air, Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, Daley, An American Saga, and Bender and Altschul, The Chosen Instrument.

24. Drawing on White (1973) satire is defined as ‘a focus absurdity and a questioning of such things as the role of individual attributes, the fates, and harmony in the resolve of organizational problems’ – Bryman et al. (2011), 430, 431.

25. A ‘focus on the heroic qualities of the individual’ – Ibid.

26. A ‘focus on the impact of fate on events, usually with a bad ending’ – Ibid.

27. A ‘focus on human beings as part of a greater organic whole, not subject to fate so much as resolving things through harmonious relations’ – Ibid.

28. Kalela (2012) argues that the writing of a history (or history-making as he sees it) is influenced, among other things, by disciplinary (i.e. ideas and standards from the field of the professional historian), public (i.e. governmental documents and artifacts that support a particular view of certain historical events), and popular (i.e. notions of historical figures and events that are produced and reproduced through cultural processes like cinema, novels, etc.) accounts.

29. Here we agree with postmodernist historiography in regard to the problems of representation – see, for example, Jenkins (2003)

30. By 1931 the airline was organized into Caribbean, Western, and Brazilian Divisions (Pan American Airways 1930b), serving thirty-six ‘countries and colonies’ over 20,664 ‘international’ route miles, up from 251 in 1928 (Pan American Airways 1931a, 12).

31. The ‘magisterial’ comment on the book is by Alfred Chandler and appears on the book’s jacket.

32. A similar point is made by Burton (2005), and more recently by accounts by Mills and Mills (2011) and Decker (2013).

33. Arguably this latter use of the term pioneer harps back to what Prasad (1997) refers to as a particularly Western notion of pioneering.

34. Leslie, a Pan Am executive at the time, made this assessment in his MIT Master’s degree (Leslie 1934). Leslie went on to become a Vice President of the airline and an influential actor in the development of Daley’s (1980) history of the company.

35. The comment is attributed to Basil Rowe who founded West Indian Aerial Express and went on to serve as Chief Pilot of Pan Am’s Atlantic Division.

36. According to Decker (2013) such events are usually ‘uneven, complex and confusing [lending themselves to] multiple explanations, [and] the eventual choice to prioritize one account over another, the bias inherent in the intellectual framework of the researcher, and the fundamental silence of some historical sources,’ 160. See also Mordhorst (2014) on businesses as both embedded in and simultaneously creators of national identity and culture.

37. Gabrielle Durepos and Trish Genoe McLaren are currently working on this issue and have presented a paper at the 2015 Academy of Management and the Critical Management Studies conferences.