Mainstreaming History in Management Research: A Dialogue

FACULTY RESEARCH IMPACTS

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.

Professor Kipping’s new book provides a historical roadmap on management research. 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?

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”.

The book is intended for anybody conducting or planning to conduct historical research within management and organization studies, and aims, in particular, at becoming a standard feature of research methods courses in business schools and departments of management.

Behlül: And what we did in the book was to elaborate on each of these more, also showing how they developed over time, their own “history”, so to speak.

Matthias: We also included some examples, didn’t we, that started with a lot of promise, where history was central, such as Labour Process Theory, but where, subsequently, research became less and less historical. Recently, though, there has been an effort among management scholars to rehabilitate scientific management, which had been eclipsed by the Human Relations school.

Behlül: However, in the big picture, what is important and what we clearly show in the book is that management history, important during the first half of the 20th century, became sidelined and remained marginal following the “scientistic turn” of US business schools since the 1950s, which moved management research closer to a natural science or engineering model.

Matthias: … and it was the growing discontent with this model, its timeless theories, and the related use of crosssectional data that prompted some scholars to call for more attention to the humanities, including history, with one programmatic article asking for a “historic turn” in organization studies — an expression ambiguous enough to act as a unifying theme for ultimately quite diverse efforts. But let’s not dwell on the past, our book is also about the future.

Behlül: Yes, our book also tries to suggest where there is potential to anchor “history” more solidly and permanently in the mainstream. Much of this depends on the increasing acceptance of qualitative data in management and organization studies. Though, as we highlight in the book, some of the research programs with the biggest potential such as, broadly defined, process organization studies, make little use of “history” as data, relying mainly on ethnography and/or interviews.

Matthias: This might be because these are already more widely accepted as research methods, despite their well-known limitations, and that doing history, i.e., going into archives and making sense of a large and diverse, yet at times incomplete body of mainly written documents, is time consuming and more difficult to justify. And there is the obligation to reduce the inherent richness of the evidence to fit into a journal article.

Behlül: Indeed, that is one reason a majority of the rare examples of what we considered the “ideal” combination of history and theory are published in book form. This combination displays what we call “historical cognizance” in that it uses historical cases and data to elucidate more general phenomena but recognizes the limitations of theorizing by acknowledging the importance of context — identifying boundary conditions for and as part of generalizations.

Matthias: Yes, that’s the thing about history, as Mark Twain is supposed to have stated: it does not repeat but often rhymes. Thus, it would be good if management scholars would aim less for timeless theories but recognize their contingent, contextualized nature. One way to do that might be collaboration, like you as an organizational theorist with an interest in history and me as a historian with an interest in theory did for this book — which is itself the culmination of a long history of joint efforts.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Matthias Kipping (left) is Professor of Policy and Richard E. Waugh Chair in Business History at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. He obtained his doctorate at the University of Munich in Germany and held previous positions in the UK and Spain.

Behlül Üsdiken (right) is an Emeritus Professor at Sabanci University and an Adjunct Professor of Management and Organization at Özyeğin University, both in Istanbul, Turkey. He received his PhD degree from the University of Istanbul.