The Past Speaks

Many of the people who follow my semi-regular blog self-identify as business historians or economic historians. A significant proportion of these individuals work in management schools. I would strongly encourage people who have traditionally presented at business history conferences to consider presenting at the 2020 Academy of Management conference, which will be held in the beautiful city of Vancouver in August. The Academy of Management has long had a Management History Division and there is currently a concerted effort underway to grow the Division and to make it the venue for the presentation of historical research of the highest calibre. This blog post is, therefore, a call for business historians, economic historians, historical EGOSians, and the other historical researchers to submit their papers to the MH division. You may send us your submissions through the AOM Submission Center until it closes on Tuesday, 14 January 2020 at 5:00 PM ET (NY Time). The Submission Center opens in early December 2019.

The Academy of Management procedure and terminology may seem a bit unusual to neophyte AoM attendees. If you have questions about such as matters as the difference between a PDW and a Symposium, feel free to contact either me or any other member of the MH executive. The key thing to know right now is that if you want to present a paper the AoM, you need to submit a fairly good, or at least complete draft of it, by the deadline for 14 August. Papers go through a peer review process before they are accepted or rejected.

Attending the Academy of Management is expensive, especially since it the arrival of 10,000 plus management academics in a city tends to push up the price of hotel rooms. However, I think that attending this conference would be worth it for many readers of this blog for the following reasons:

• The AoM is a great opportunity of networking and professional advancement.
• Attending the AoM gives historical researches a chance to learn from the editors of high-impact factor journals about their expectations.
• The MH is methodologically diverse and includes papers that use a range of quantitative and qualitative methods. It is a broad church in terms of methodology.
• The AoM is also characterised by a high degree of viewpoint diversity, which is the hallmark of a top-notch social scientific conference. You have Austrian economists who are hardcore libertarians. You have Marxists. You have everything in between. You have papers that are co-authored by teams of academics that are ideologically diverse. That diversity is a good sign.
• The MH division and the AoM is very diverse in terms of nationality and about 40% of presenters are non-North American.