Introduction to the Special Collection on Revisionist History in Management Research

Abstract

This article introduces the special collection on revisionist history in management research. We asked prominent scholars to reflect on the current state of the research on their chosen topic, and how our field got there through specific decisions they or other researchers made. We also encouraged our authors to engage in counterfactual thinking by imagining how things could have been different. Our contributors offer novel, provocative insights on a variety of topics including organizational identification; emotional labor; resistance to change; territoriality; deviant behavior; and academic careers. In this article we discuss the origins of the special collection, elaborate on our approach to revisionist history, and provide brief overviews of the six papers in the collection. We conclude by discussing how others could build on our approach to revisionist history to provide other valuable lessons for management research.