FACULTY RESEARCH IMPACTS
Mainstreaming History in Management Research: A Dialogue Matthias Kipping
Schulich Policy Professor and Richard E. Waugh Chair in Business History Matthias Kipping’s recently released book, History in Management and Organization Studies: From Margin to Mainstream, presents a comprehensive and integrated view of how history has informed management research with a focus on organizational theory and strategy. The book was co-authored with Professor Behlül Üsdiken from Özyeğin University. To provide some background on this achievement, Professors Kipping and Üsdiken sat together to have a dialogue.
Matthias: Thanks, Behlül, for agreeing to join in this dialogue, trying to familiarize the readers of Schulich’s Spotlight on Research with our book on History in Management and Organization Studies: From Margin to Mainstream. If I had to say what this book is trying to do, it is to take stock of the many ways that “history”, broadly defined, has become more central to management researchers. And by mapping out systematically what research there is, we also wanted to allow current and new scholars to see where their work would fit on that map, how their actual or possible contributions help put history into the mainstream of research on management and organizations, as the book’s sub-title suggests. Your take? Professor Kipping’s new book provides a historical roadmap on management research.
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Behlül: Yes, the idea of a systematic overview was certainly important for us. It also influenced the style of the book, which, as I think I said in one of our frequent back-and-forth exchanges when writing it, consists of “one damn reference after another.” This means it might exhaust those
trying to read it from the front to the back cover, and it should be used more like a manual to dive into one of the many “research programs”, as we called them, where history plays a role. The number of those research programs is quite impressive, which is why we sub-titled our article in The Academy of Management Annals (2014), where we first developed our systematic framework, “More than meets the eye”. Matthias: True, the Annals article was crucial, because we developed the main distinction also used in this book between “history to theory” and “history in theory” based on the recognition that an effort to theorize is fundamental to all management research. The former refers to those research programs that use historical data, both quantitative and qualitative, to develop, elaborate or test theories, with ecological approaches probably the most obvious example. The latter incorporates the past into the theory itself like “path dependence” or the now hugely popular “imprinting”.
