Introduction to the Handbook of Research on Management and Organizational History: the hotly contested present state of management and organizational history

Abstract

If ever there was an apposite time to write about management and organizational history (MOH hereafter) this is certainly it, rendering the contents of this handbook all the more topical. As I was preparing the volume for submission, two very pointed reviews of A New History of Management (NHM hereafter) (Cummings et al., 2017) appeared in the Journal of Management History (JMH hereafter) (Batiz-Lazo, 2019; Muldoon, 2019) of which, in the interests of full disclosure, I am an associate editor. In the interim, the editor-in-chief of JMH also published Work, Wealth, and Postmodernism: The Intellectual Conflict at the Heart of Business Endeavour (WWP hereafter) (Bowden, 2018), ostensibly as a retort to NHM. Throw in some unsavoury social media exchanges about aforesaid JMH reviews, as well as a special issue devoted to history and organization studies in the world’s leading management journal (Godfrey et al., 2016) and an earlier paper on a similar topic in the same journal (Rowlinson et al., 2014), and we have all the makings of an introduction for this handbook. It would not be at all inaccurate or unfair to argue that this current ferment in MOH is the inevitable consequence of Clark and Rowlinson’s (2004) provocative piece a decade and a half ago heralding a ‘historic turn’ in organization studies and advocating a more postmodernist approach to accounts as well as methods of dealing with the past. Similar provocations are discernible, I believe, in the founding of the journal Management and Organizational History in 2006. Among other “prospects” for the journal, the founding editors-in-chief cite the “historic turn in organization theory” and “the relevance for management and organization theory of philosophers of history such as Michel Foucault and Hayden White” (Booth and Rowlinson, 2006, p. 5). I also (autoethnographically?) witnessed this ongoing agitation at an Academy of Management professional development workshop I co-organized in 2014, as well as at a meeting of the Management History Research Group in 2015, where extraordinarily heated debate ensued concerning, respectively, “more critical, cultural, and qualitative historical research” and “method, methodology, and the historic-turn”. So, what’s all the fuss about? In essence, NHM is a “counter-historical approach” encouraging management and organizational historians to follow Foucault’s lead and eschew accounting for history “against a criterion of linear progress” which legitimizes the status quo and forecloses alternatives. Rather, we should seek to understand