Management and business history – a reflexive research agenda for the 2020s

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reflect back over his career as a management and business historian so far as to consider opportunities for the future of management and business history as a disciplinary area. Design/methodology/approach The paper consists of two segments – the first half is an auto-ethnographic personal reflection looking at the author’s research journey and how the discipline as experienced by the author has evolved over that time. The second half is a prescriptive look forward to consider how we should leverage the strengths as historians to progress the discipline forward. Findings The paper demonstrates opportunities for management and business history to encompass new agendas including the expansion of the topic into teaching, the possibility for the advancement of empirical contributions and opportunities for findings in new research areas, including the global south and public and project management history. Originality/value The paper demonstrates that historians should be more confident in the disciplinary capabilities, particularly their understandings of historic context, continuity, change and chronologies when making empirical and theoretical contributions.

Social economy advancement: from voluntary to secure organizational commitments to public benefit

“…The research approach is a single case study (Yin, 2011) and uses data gathered from multiple sources. A single case study is particularly appropriate for investigating novel phenomena and processes (Eisenhardt, 1989), and an historical case study enables connections to be made between context, chronology, continuity and change (Nicholls and Teasdale, 2017; Sepulveda, 2015; Tennent, 2020). The aim of the qualitative methodology and inductive approach is thus to describe the structural development of the UK social economy.…”

“…Articles that cited “community interest company’ between January 1, 1994 and December 31, 2005 were also retrieved from Factiva ( n = 161 articles). Accepting that archival sources are not neutral (Tennent, 2020) and formal published sources of information present a version of events that is likely to reflect the interests of the source (Bowden, 2019), semistructured interviews were conducted with informants connected with the establishment of the CIC organizational form. The process of locating the originators of the idea for the CIC took approximately six months and after interviewing the founders, purposive sampling (Morse, 2010) was used to identify other informants associated with the establishment of the CIC legal structure.…”

Editorial

“…Historians with their archival research skills and understanding of historical context, chronology, continuity and change (Tennent, 2020b) are also uniquely positioned to bring a critical approach to understanding CSR. Morality and ethics are a social construct rooted in cultural understanding and socialisation, but these moral codes and socialisations are capable of changing over time.…”

Making a hybrid out of a crisis: historical contingency and the institutional logics of London’s public transport monopoly

“…The case does, however, demonstrate the generalisability of the principles of hybridity and institutional logics to be equally applicable to the first half of the 20th century, thus broadening the evidence base for their temporal scope. This is important because extant literature focuses either mainly on the 21st century context but with some (Pache and Santos, 2013) or is based upon cases situated within the latter half of the 20th century (Battilana and Dorado, 2010;Gillett and Tennent, 2020, 2020Thornton and Ocasio, 1999).…”

“…This paper seeks to extend historical enquiry into hybridity and evaluate the reasons for creating a monopoly public service provider through a historical case study blending both economic and political sources of evidence. We think that this approach allows a mode of historical explanation which permits a dialogue with, yet circumvents, the pure abstraction of new economic history and encourages a multi-modal methodology (Tennent, 2020). Therefore, while we offer six tables of statistical information, we use this quantitative data to support our wider qualitative evaluation rather than presenting it as the totality of our analysis.…”