The Past Speaks

The author Ken McGoogan has recently proposed that Scotland leave the UK and become part of Canada.  His argument is that Scotland would enjoy considerable autonomy as a Canadian province and tariff-free access to the EU market. His proposal, which has attracted some attention in the press, is reminiscent of the early twentieth century Irish and Scottish nationalists who favoured imperial federation, a constitutional arrangement in which there would be a common parliament for the British Empire along with a federal system in which each country (Scotland, Canada, England, etc) would enjoy internal autonomy– Home Rule All Round.  I would say that there is a zero percent chance of this proposal being implemented  but it is interesting that some people in Scotland are thinking in such terms. The sentimental ties between Scotland and Canada remain strong. Moreover, the social memory of the historic ties between the two countries is being used by a variety of social actors, including Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, who made an appearance yesterday at the 100th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. (It is not entirely clear what agenda drove Ms. Sturgeon to travel to France for this event, which was also attend by the French president and other EU leaders).  Even though academic military historians tend to scoff at claims that it was important, the Battle of Vimy Ridge now looms large in the Canadian historical consciousness in which the same way that Galliopi is important to present-day Australian. For those who want to learn more about how the memory of Vimy Ridge is used by Canadian social actors, I would recommend this recent piece by the journalist Tony Keene as well as this article by Jean Martin, a historian.

That’s the title of our paper for the Academy of International Business UK&I conference. My co-author Jennifer Johns will be presenting it.

Abstract

This paper examines digital technologies with a focus on a particular type of digital fabrication space, the FabLab. Much existing research on these technologies predicts transformative impacts on international business through the adoption of digital technologies.  We aim to begin filling the gap in empirical examination of this issue, using qualitative interview data collected between 2014 and 2017 in the Manchester, Barcelona and London FabLabs. These sites of adoption of, and innovation in, digital technologies are lenses through which we can observe the interaction of actors in the evolution of digital technology.  We find that a significant challenge for international business is the highly uneven landscape of innovation in digital technologies.  Far from being uniform, development in digital technologies and their impact on international business and production networks are highly geographically specific.

Since a major theme of the year’s AIB UK&I conference is deglobalization, I should stress that our paper is agnostic on the question of whether digital fabrication technologies such as 3-D printers will actually contribute to deglobalization  by decentralizing manufacturing back towards the household and community levels  Instead, our paper’s focus is on how European entrepreneurs who work with digital fabrication technologies engage in sensemaking to understand our current era in economic-historical time. I would point out that even if the most radical version of the ‘substitution scenario’ comes to pass and most manufacturing reverts back to the community or household level, it would not mean that globalization itself had been reversed. Such a scenario would instead represent a change in the nature of global production networks from a system in which manufactured goods are moved long distances to one in which the data in the form of the designs for such goods are transmitted long distances and are then applied to raw materials, some of which are sourced locally. Such a scenario would be congruent with a trend that has been underway since approximately 2008: as a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute observed, globalization in the form of the circulation of physical goods has become proportionally less important, as global merchandize trade as percentage of world economic output has fallen, but the globalization of data flows has become ever more important.

The annual conference for the International Council on Archives‘ (ICA) Section on Business Archives (SBA) is taking place right now,  5-6 April 2017, in Stockholm. A follow-up conference will be taking place 4–6 December in Mumbai. Both events are about the Future Role of Business Archives and should interest both business historians and uses of the past scholars (I’m both). In the photo below, you can see Kathrine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation giving keynote today.  Photo courtesy of Anders Ravn Sørensen

Although I can’t be at the Stockholm conference, I am hoping to get to the one in Mumbai. The focus of the Stockholm conference in on the importance of using true stories for external brand-building communication. In Mumbai, the focus on the internal effects that historical stories can have on management decisions and organizational culture. Since my current research looks at how history influences managerial cognition and organizational culture, the Mumbai conference is a better fit for my research.

These two conferences will help us to answer the following questions: why do corporate archives exist?  How does the use of history give firms a competitive advantage?  How do corporate archives help firms to use history more effectively?   Why on earth would a for-profit company fund the creation of a corporate archive? Why are firms in some industries more likely to spend money on elaborate archives than firms in other industries?  Scholars  various disciplines have come up with competing explanations for why corporate archives exist.  There is a consensus that corporate archives exist because they help firms to achieve their objectives. However, there is disagreement about precisely how archives give firms a competitive advantage.

According to National Strategy for Business Archives of England and Wales (2009), which was written by people trained in the academic discipline of archive science, company archives exist to support “new product innovation, corporate culture and brand identity management information and evidence to protect against litigation, trademark infringement, or assault on reputation”. This description of the function of corporate archives hints at the fact that corporate archives can serve very different purposes.  According to Castellani and Rossato (2014), two Italian communications studies professors,  corporate archives “act as an innovative communication tool” that create opportunities “for dialogue between the company and its community”. This interpretation, likely reflects the Italian context of the authors and is difficult to reconcile with the examples of corporations that fund excellent, well-organized archives that are closed to all external users (Alcan’s archive in Montreal is a famous case in point).

My point is that right now the social-scientific literature doesn’t give us a clear generalisable answer about what exactly corporate archives are for and how they contribute to the competitive advantage of companies. Our paper seeks to answer these questions.  Our argument is that possessing an archive gives a firm a competitive advantage because it makes the historical narratives produced by the firm seem more authentic in the eyes of stakeholders. Most firms invest at least a few resources in the production of historical narratives. The advantage one gets by spending money on a proper archive is that people in post-Enlightenment cultures are much more likely to believe a firm’s historical narrative if it is based on archival documents. It is no coincidence that the world’s first corporate archive was developed by the East India Company in the wake of the Enlightenment, which had convinced educated British people that for a historical narrative to be true, it had to be based on primary sources. Needless to say, many companies have since emulated the EIC’s archive-based rhetorical history strategy!

Castellani, P., & Rossato, C. (2014). On the communication value of the company museum and archives. Journal of Communication Management, 18(3), 240-253.

The Business History Conference is my favourite conference of the year. I always come away from this conference feeling energized and inspired. One of the great strengths of the BHC is its interdisciplinarity: economists, historians, management academics, and many other contribute to making the conference very rich. Many of the people who work in management schools who attend BHC will tell you that the research presented here is of greater relevance than the papers that are presented at many management conferences.  The conversations one has at BHC are fascinating: where else can you speak to range of people that include NASA employees, practicing corporate lawyers, and the odd Hollywood actor.

This year’s conference was, in many ways, a typical BHC conference. However, it was exceptional in the sense that there were frequent references to the life and work of the late Chris Kobrak. At last year’s BHC, Chris Kobrak held a reception to announce the launch of the Canadian Business History Association. This year, there was a reception to honour the memory of Professor Kobrak.

Andrew Smith: This is the abstract of the paper I will be presenting today at a pre-conference workshop here at the Business History Conference. 

Judging by the content of the leading journals in their field, International Business (IB) scholars have paid little attention to how the imagined communities of race, faith, and ethnicity influence the strategies of multinational firms. In recent years, the terms “othering” and “otherization,” which were previously used postcolonialist academics, have become part of the lexicon of political commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. The Oxford English Dictionary identified “otherize”.  Otherization is the process by which a racial, religious, or ethnic group is deemed to be exotic, alien, and interior to the observer. In March 2016, National Public Radio in the United States noted that this word was being by analysts to describe a particular presidential campaign’s methods of representing those who are perceived to be outside the national community.  These development have profound implications f or multinational firms, particularly those with multicultural global workforces.  Indeed, the managers of the world’s leading corporations appear to be increasingly worried about the rise of populism and xenophobia. Multicultural global capitalism appears to be under attack. Otherization and xenophobia, terms whose use was once confined to left-wing academics and activists, is now being used in debates about the future of global capitalism.  Business people are aware that there has been a change in the mind-set of many voters, consumers, and policymakers.

Historians will note that the process of otherization is nothing new and the level of ‘otherization’ in the world is not a fixed constant but a variable that changes over time. To become relevant again, IB scholars should become more historical. By becoming more historical, I mean that IB scholars should both take advantage of historical empirical data for theory testing and development and should engage with such issues as otherization, two themes that are very important to scholars in history departments.  In my  paper, I call on historians of international business to do for the Otherization of racial, ethnic, and religious groups  what international business historians are starting to do for warfare: to combine serious archival research and IB theory so as to produce scholarly works that can inform managerial concerns in the present. My paper will sketch several  ways in which historians of international business can develop our understanding how the shifts in mindsets associated with Otherization have influenced how commercial activity across the imagined borders of races and civilizations have been conducted. It is my contention that by exploring how such “large-group” identities influenced the operation of international business in the past, we can help IB scholars to think about the impact of Otherization in the present, and possible future.

Two 3-year fully funded PhD Scholarships

to be held at the University of Glasgow from September 2017

Applications are invited for two 3-year PhD scholarships (with a possibility of a one-year extension) in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow.

The successful candidates will be part of the ERC-funded project The Making of a Lopsided Union: Economic Integration in the European Economic Community, 1957-1992 (EURECON) led by Dr Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol. They are expected to begin on 1 September 2017, or as soon as possible thereafter.

Description of the EURECON project

The goal of EURECON is to explore European policymakers’ views about how to make the organisation of the European Economic Community (EEC) fit for the creation of a single currency, from 1957 to 1992. It is often said that the euro has faults of conception. But how did this happen? How was the euro made in such a way that it nearly completely overlooked some critical aspects of monetary unions? The assumption is that in the run-up to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, European policymakers just did not think properly about how to make the Euro work. Was this really the case? Did European policymakers really overlook the economic foundations of European monetary union?

The project aims to examine European policymakers’ debates and proposals, understand the reasons for their success or failure, identify the dynamics of political and economic trade-offs and compromises, shifting priorities, and alternative approaches that were abandoned at the time but recycled later. The project focuses on five work packages: macroeconomic policy coordination, fiscal transfers, capital market integration, banking harmonisation/supervision and the deepening of the common/single market. The project will examine the origins of the issues that are currently bedevilling the European Union (EU) by investigating the period between the creation of the EEC in 1957 and the decision to create a European single currency in 1992.

PhD positions

The PhD projects will focus on the role and influence of non-state, non-EEC actors and factors in the above discussions. Interested applicants should focus specifically on the role of one of the following actors/factor:

• Commercial banks: Commercial banks were central actors in the development of European economic integration, in particular with regard to capital market integration, regulation/supervision, and the development of the common/single market. Did they support the creation of a common market in banking? Did they adopt specific lobbying strategies within their respective member states and in Brussels? How did they view the possible future creation of a monetary union in Europe?

• Big business (other than banks): The implementation of the common/single market, the issue of EEC fiscal transfers, and macroeconomic policy coordination had an impact on the conduct of business in Europe. Did big business consider that these developments would improve their environment, in creating more business opportunities, easier financing and trade? The Roundtable of Industrialists famously lobbied for the Single Market Project; did big business aim to actively support or oppose other developments at different time periods?

• Trade unions: Macroeconomic policy coordination, EEC fiscal transfers, and the development of the common/single market had an important impact upon labour relations. How did trade unions try to influence European economic policymaking? In particular, how did they promote European social policies and how did they cope with the challenges induced by European economic integration in a globalising world? The rise of unemployment in Europe from the 1970s as well as the reflections mentioned above about the introduction of an EEC-wide unemployment benefit provided an important points of interest for trade unions.

• The spread and influence of economic ideas on the evolution of European economic cooperation and integration: Many economic ideas have influenced and competed over the development of European economic integration, including German ordo-liberalism, French planning, and neo-liberalism. Recent studies have shed light on the rise of neo-liberal politics in the evolution of thinking about deregulation and the free movement of capital. How did economic thinking evolve in the EEC and how did these influences permeate policymaking at the European level? This topic would more specifically focus on the intellectual history dimension of the economic integration of Europe by looking at one of these schools of thought. How did these ideas spread among European policymakers? How did these ideas change over time? What was their actual influence?

The successful candidate is expected to:

• Write a PhD thesis under the supervision of Dr Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol
• Be an active part of the EURECON project and work in close cooperation with other team members
• Present papers at conferences
• Publish in international peer-reviewed journals (individual and co-authored)
• Participate in yearly workshops organised within the scope of EURECON.

The successful candidate will register for a PhD in Economic and Social History, School of Social and Political Sciences, College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow.

The scholarship covers the successful student’s full-time home/EU tuition fees (£4,121 p.a. for 2016/17), pays a stipend (£14,296 p.a. for 2016/17), and includes a research budget allowance to cover expenses related to archival research and conference attendance (at least £1500 p.a.). There is a possibility for an extension to a fourth year, under the same financial conditions.

PhD students at the University of Glasgow benefit from the College of Social Sciences’ Graduate School Research Training Programme, as well as an annual Thesis Review Committee and an annual Doctoral Retreat. PhD students may also have the opportunity to become Graduate Teaching Assistants and gain teaching experience.

Candidates must be fluent in English. A good command of another European language would be an advantage.

How to apply

Please include the following supporting documentation with your application:

• Your CV
• Your research proposal focusing on one of the actors/factors outlined above (max. 2500 words, including footnotes, references and bibliography)
• Your degree transcripts
• Your English language certificate
• Two letters of reference

Interested candidates should apply on the University of Glasgow’s Online Application System http://www.gla.ac.uk/research/opportunities/howtoapplyforaresearchdegree/#/. Applicants should put ‘EURECON’ in the ‘Research Title’ field in ‘Step 6 – Course Details’ of the application form, and select ‘PhD in Economic and Social History (Research)’.

Interested applicants are strongly advised to discuss their research proposal with Dr Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol (emmanuel.mourlon-druol@glasgow.ac.uk) before they apply.

Short-listed candidates may be invited for an interview in Glasgow.
Application deadline is 7 May 2017.

Use of Methodology in Management History
Special issue call for papers from Journal of Management History

Guest Editors:
Wim van Lent, Montpellier Business School
Gabrielle Durepos, Mount Saint Vincent University

Submission deadline: 1 February 2018

Background

Ever since the “historical turn” in organisation studies (Clark and Rowlinson 2004), the importance of history to understanding organisations and institutions has been increasingly recognized (e.g. Sydow, Schreyogg and Koch 2009, Ocasio, Mauskapf and Steele 2015, Suddaby 2016, Durepos and Mills 2012). Since history provides an alternative to the dominant science paradigms in organisation studies (Zald 1993), studies using a historical approach are contributing to and even shaping a growing number of scholarly debates (Decker, Kipping and Wadhwani 2015). The growing appreciation of historical approaches to building and testing organisation theory has spawned a body of work on how to engage in historical analysis with the specific aim of bridging the gap between the historical and organisational scientific communities (e.g. Rowlinson, Hassard and Decker 2014, De Jong, Higgins and Van Driel 2015, Whittle and Wilson 2015, Suddaby 2016, Durepos 2015). The fundamental insight that emerges from it is that history is no less fragmented than organisational theory (Rowlinson et al. 2014: 269). According to Bowden (2016), management scholars are essentially divided along a continuum with on the one extreme De Jong et al.’s (2015) position that history should be empirical and theory-oriented, and on the other extreme Whittle and Wilson’s (2015) “ethnomethodological” perspective, which is rooted in postmodernism and takes a more critical perspective on history-writing. Scholars find themselves either on the continuum with genealogy (Decker et al. 2015) and rhetorical history (Suddaby, Foster and Quinn Trank 2010) and even beyond with ANTi-History (Durepos and Mills 2012, 2017).

Although methodological diversity could impede moving the field forward, the variety that they encompass comes with potential, for example in terms of diversity of research questions and richness of historical knowledge (Decker et al. 2015). Fortunately, the conditions for the further development of management history (also in relation to other fields) seem to be in place: despite history’s growing permeation of organisation studies, there is still a lot of evidence enclosed in corporate archives with which management historians can formulate novel insights into the working of organisations and institutions (Rowlinson et al. 2014, Mills and Helms Mills 2017). However, in order to fully realize this potential, management history will have to go beyond “merely” continuing the proliferation of research using alternative types of historical data and analysis. Most importantly, research should be multidisciplinary (Bucheli and Wadhwani 2014), connecting an understanding of organisational theory and methods with historical contexts and source material (Rowlinson et al. 2014), or involving multiple sources and methods for data analysis (Bowden 2016). In addition, since histories are not uncontested records, management history is greatly helped by methodological reflexivity (Rowlinson et al. 2014). That is, when researchers are aware of their role in selecting certain traces over others, what their sources cover, and how and why they were put together, as well as the shaping influence of the historical context within which they construct theoretical arguments, they may improve the plausibility of their analyses and better identify scope conditions (Bowden 2016).

Aims and Scope

This special issue has two broad purposes: 1) to move forward the methodological debates in management history and 2) to demonstrate the use of / refine historical methods in organisational research through empirical analysis. We therefore welcome both theoretical and empirical papers. Below we suggest a non-exhaustive list of specific topics that contribute to the above two goals. Papers focusing on topics that are not included but sufficiently related to the goals highlighted above would also be welcome as submissions to the special issue.

• Epistemology and management history
• Typification of research methodologies
• Novel research methods in management history
• Ways in which different methods can be combined for richer empirical insights
• Empirical demonstrations of the use of one or several methodologies
• Methodological refinement through empirical analysis
• Benefits / drawbacks of research methods for a management history audience

Submission Process

Submitted papers must conform to the submission guidelines of the Journal of Management History. Manuscripts are due by 1 February 2018 and must be submitted using the JMH submission system at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmh. Authors should indicate that they would like their document to be considered for the special issue “Uses of Methodology in Management History”. Authors of papers invited to be revised and resubmitted will be expected to work within a tight timeframe for revisions.

Further information
Questions pertaining to this special issue may be directed to:
• Wim van Lent (w.vanlent@montpellier-bs.com)
• Gabrielle Durepos (gabrielle.durepos@msvu.ca)
• Bradley Bowden (b.bowden@griffith.edu.au)

For questions about submitting to the special issue contact the JMH Publisher, Patti Davis (pdavis@emeraldinsight.com).

References

Bowden, B (2016) Editorial and note on the writing of management history. Journal of Management History, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 118-129.
Bucheli M and Wadhwani D (2014) Organizations in time: history, theory, methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark P and Rowlinson M (2004) The treatment of history in organisation studies: toward an “historic turn”? Business History, Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 331-352.
De Jong A, Higgins DM and Van Driel H (2015) Towards a new business history? Business History, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 5-29.
Decker S, Kipping M and Wadhwani D (2015) New business histories! Plurality in business history research methods. Business History, Vol. 57, No.1, pp. 30-40.
Durepos G (2015) ANTi-history: Toward amodern histories, in P Genoe McLaren, AJ Mills and T Weatherbee (Eds.), The Routledge companion to management and organisational history (pp. 153-180). New York: Routledge.
Durepos G and Mills A (2012) ANTi-history: Theorizing the past, history, and
historiography in management and organizational studies. Charlotte, NC:
Information Age Publishing.
Durepos G and Mills A (In press, 2017) ANTi-history: An alternative approach to historiography, in C Cassell, A Cunliffe and G Grandy (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative business and management research methods. London: Sage.
Mills A and Helms Mills J (In press, 2017) Archival research, in C Cassell, A Cunliffe and G Grandy (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative business and management research methods. London: SAGE.
Ocasio W, Mauskapf M and Steele CWJ (2016) History, society, and institutions: the role of collective memory in the emergence and evolution of societal logics, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 676-699.
Rowlinson M, Hassard J and Decker S (2014) Research strategies for organisational history: a dialogue between historical theory and organization theory, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 250-274.
Suddaby R (2016) Toward a historical consciousness: following the historic turn in management thought, M@n@gement, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 46-60.
Suddaby R, Foster W and Quinn Trank C (2010) Rhetorical history as a source of competitive advantage, Advances in Strategic Management, Vol. 27, pp. 147-173.
Sydow J, Schreyögg G and Koch J (2009) Organisational path dependence: opening the black box, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 689-709.
Whittle A and Wilson J (2015) Ethnomethodology and the production of history: studying ‘history-in-action’, Business History, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 41-63.
Zald M (1993) Organisation studies as a scientific and humanistic enterprise: towards a reconceptualization of the foundations of the field, Organisation Science, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 513-528.