Business History: A Cultural and Narrative Approach

Abstract

This article argues that a cultural and narrative perspective can enrich the business history field, encourage new and different questions and answers, and provide new ways of thinking about methods and empirical material. It discusses what culture is and how it relates to narratives. Taking a cultural and narrative approach may affect questions, sources, and methodologies, as well as the status of our results. Finally, a narrative approach may contribute to our historical understanding of entrepreneurship and globalization.

Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies

“…The value of history conceived as explicating, wherein synthetic narratives emerge from the interplay of theory and evidence, lies in applying and developing theory to reveal the operation of transformative social processes. It is arguably the narrative mode of historical enquiry that has gained most traction in organization studies in recent 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 years (Brown & Humphreys, 2002;Hansen, 2012;Rowlinson et al, 2010), reflecting the growing recognition that narratives open a valuable window onto the organizational world (Gabriel, 2000). The value of history conceived as conceptualizing, wherein historical analysis stimulates new ways of seeing, resides in generating new theoretical constructs.…”

Introduction: The era of management: a historical perspective on twentieth-century management

“…All authors are familiar with the sociocultural approach, which is now common among academic historians (Te Velde 2010, 365) and known in the field of business and management history as well (e.g. Hansen 2012). Thus, the contributors are familiar with theoretical and methodical considerations on how to research management history, but the case studies presented here mostly combine archival research with source criticism to uncover management developments.…”

“…Clark and Rowlinson 2004;Kroeze and Keulen 2013), Business History Review (e.g. Hansen 2012) and Enterprise and Society (e.g. Godelier 2009).…”

Constructing Boland Bank: organizational change and transformation in the South African trust company movement, c.1940–c.1970

“…A narrative historical approach to organizational culture and change is the best way to illustrate all these features (Hansen 2007(Hansen , 2012. Hansen (2012, 699) demonstrates how the historical narratives of organizations can act as a constraint by limiting choices and creating 'inertia and blind spots' that inhibit the ability and willingness to change and to adopt new strategies.…”

“…Confronted with a changing socioeconomic and competitive environment and a statutory regulatory framework, these institutions that considered themselves the aristocrats of South African financial institutions were forced to reconsider elements of their embedded narrative such as their management practices, strategy and structure and corporate culture in an attempt to survive as financial institutions. As thick description is a helpful historical way of describing contest and change over time (Hansen 2012), the contours of the response to these challenges and pressures can best be extrapolated through an in-depth study of the debates in the forums of the Association of Trust Companies of South Africa. The focus of this article is to analyze and explain aspects of this process -A process that eventually changed them from small local financial institutions with a primary focus on trust services operating without any statutory control to becoming general banks with a primary focus more in line with traditional banking services and subject to the statutory regulatory framework.…”