Editorial

Citation

Bowden, B. and Muldoon, J. (2021), "Editorial", Journal of Management History, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 165-168. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMH-04-2021-293

With this edition of the journal, we wish to advise authors, reviewers and editors of a change in the journal’s editors. Although Bradley Bowden will continue as Editor, a position he has held since 2015, he will be joined as Co-Editor by Jeff Muldoon. As readers would be aware, Muldoon has consistently submitted articles to the journal since 2012, many of which top the journal’s citation list. As Co-Editors, the two of us have recently shared an extensive collaborative effort in bringing the massive Palgrave Handbook of Management History (www.springerprofessional.de/en/the-palgrave-handbook-of-management-history/18488966?tocPage=1) to fruition. Our approach in this journal will remain “broad church” or “big tent,” meaning that management scholars of all types and persuasions will be able to publish their work in the journal. As such, this journal considers philosophical, empirical and theoretical issues related to the history of management and business. Reflecting our focus, this issue has a wide range of papers.

In our first article in this edition, “Battle for the Boot: Trademarks and Competitiveness in the Global UGG Boot Industry, 1979–2019,” Amanda Budde-Sung (Department of Management, U.S. Air Force Academy, CO Springs, CO, USA) has written an article about one of the staples about modern fashion, UGG boots. The quality of this article is indicated by the fact that it was awarded the Journal of Management History Award by the Management History Division of the Academy of Management as the best internationally themed paper presented to the Division at the AOM’s Annual Meeting in Boston in 2019. Its central theme relates to the business importance of international intellectual property and how it has affected the global ugg boot market. For those not sartorially inclined, an ugg is a type of sheepskin boot invented in Australia. UGG, by contrast, is a brand name owned by an American company, Deckers Outdoor Corporation. Deckers was able to overcome the first mover advantage of the Australian ugg boot industry by trademarking the word “ugg” in many countries around the world outside of Australia, effectively preventing the Australian ugg boot industry from expanding beyond Australia’s borders. Australian firms underestimated the cultural differences between Australia and the USA, causing them to miss an opportunity. Budde-Sung argues that:

[…] failure to aggressively and effectively protect a brand’s image in a foreign market can result in the loss of a competitive advantage for the focal firm and a concurrent gain for imitating firms.

The advantage of the first mover comes from not only the knowledge of the market and product but also the ability of the first mover to legally codify their advantage, in this case, by registering a word for trademark protection in countries where that word was unknown. Trademarks represent a powerful tool for establishing and protecting a firm’s competitive advantage. For example, where would Coca-Cola be without its trademark? As Budde-Sung indicates, the Australian industry did not understand how changing international markets and differences in culture would cause them to lose their advantage regarding the product they created. In highlighting the importance of intellectual property and branding, this article has made an important contribution to the literature on decline, which has mostly focused on economic issues or innovative processes, ignoring the fact that modern intellectual property law confers legal monopolies to companies. The literature on strategy, economics, legal issues and competitive advantage needs to focus greater attention on the legal aspects of competitive advantages or, similar to Facebook, the creation of a monopoly through social network effects. Management historians can play an important part in this movement because of our deep understanding of the roots of modern management.

Our second article is from John H. Humphreys (Texas A&M University-Commerce, Commerce, TX, USA), Milorad M. Novicevic (Department of Management, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi, USA), Stephanie S. Pane Haden (Department of Management, TX A&M University-Commerce, Commerce, TX, USA) and Md. Kamrul Hasan (Department of Management, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA), who have written an excellent paper on the United States Civil Rights figure, Whitney Young. In a different form, this paper won the John F Mee Prize, as best paper in the Academy of Management, History division in 2020. Based upon the theorizing of Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018), this paper provides a narrative case of enabling leadership’s role in creating adaptive organizations. The selection of Young’s experience as a case study is an excellent one, given that Young was widely respected during a difficult and divisive time, and two, because Young has remained a relatively unnoticed figure in history. The paper found that Young used conciliatory language which enabled social change to emerge. Young’s accomplishment was that he recognized that “enabling leaders in socially complex environments may leverage organizational identity to more effectively engage connecting and conflicting processes, which include the use of characterizing practices.” Young’s ability to bridge President Richard Nixon, business and Civil Rights groups is a testimony to Young’s ability to build consensus, be considered a fair broker and his ability as an enabling leader.

The third article in this edition, about the Ocean Ranger disaster, is from Mary A. Furey (St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada), Lawrence T. Corrigan (Department of Accounting, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada) and Jean Helms Mills (Department of Management, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada and Jyväskylä School of Business and Economics, Jyväskylä University, Jyväskylä, Finland). This article reflects on the context of intellectual creation, namely, the idea that knowledge is socially created and defined, helps to influence the writing of history. The case study the authors focus on is the Ocean Ranger disaster, which was a semisubmersible mobile offshore drilling unit which sunk in Canada in 1982. The most notable aspect of this article is that it:

[…] makes a contribution within the genre of disaster inquiry reporting by explaining how a formal historical record (the public inquiry report) may be created and how the report is related to aspects of power embedded in a storyteller’s sense of reality.

One of the compelling arguments of the article is that scholars need to look past official papers to find out what happened. They conclude that “historical contextualization is about becoming aware of differences and holding a sense of restraint in attempting to generalize research finding.” Furey et al., in regard to the Ocean Ranger disaster, makes a salient point – writing an official report, much similar to a dissertation or journal article, is a political act, as much (maybe more) as a focus on attempting to determine what happened.

Our next paper is on the Eastland disaster, written by Yaron Zoller (Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, WI, USA) and Jeff Muldoon (Emporia State University, KS, USA). This paper looks at one of the worst disasters in maritime history, the capsizing of the SS Eastland of 1915, with a massive loss of life. The Eastland was commissioned by Western Electric to send workers and their families to a company gathering. Western Electric, of course, was the company behind the (in-)famous Hawthorne studies (1924–1933), one of the most influential and important of all social science experiments. This paper draws up a lead proposed by John Hassard (2012) to examine the influence of the context behind the Hawthorne studies, such as examining the plant and the surrounding community. The argument of the paper is that the initial researchers on Human Relations, such as Fritz Roethlisberger, George Homans, T.N. Whitehead and Elton Mayo, ignored the social aspects to focus on the internal life in the plant. In doing so, they overlooked the impact Eastland disaster and the attempts of Western Electric to aid workers through welfare capitalism and other programs following the Eastland disaster. Despite being innocent of any malfeasance, management aid to the victims and their families. Much similar to the Ocean Ranger paper, with this paper, we see how official accounts can be flawed. The difference here is not power, per se, but differences in perspective.

In our fifth article, Armen E. Petrosyan (Institute for Business Consulting, Tver, Russian Federation) has written an excellent paper on the role of business in Ancient Rome. Petrosyan takes aim at scholars who argue that entrepreneurship is a new concept or one derived from the Italian Renaissance. Mark Casson and Catherine Casson – noted entrepreneurship scholars – come in for particular criticism. These scholars, it is suggested, have downplayed Roman circumstances, noting that Roman economy was based, in part, on the elite using usury laws, land acquisition and slavery to enrich themselves. Petrosyan argues that:

[…] mature Republic and early Empire, Rome was teeming with able entrepreneurs. Moreover, it invented both the formal framework of public enterprise and its informal private counterpart. Not only finely elaborated legal protection of commercial operations but also rudiments of accounting, a mature tax system, diverse and branched banking network, and other necessary prerequisites of successful business, including emerging mass markets, were in existence there.

Petrosyan goes further by stating:

[…] it (the private enterprise) is run by a person (director) to whom the proprietor transmits his capital for use, reserving for himself ownership and an essential (decisive) stake in profits. However, those who are capable of conducting business on their own and possess all the requisites for that, scarcely will do it for somebody else, at the cost of subjection to him.

Thus, it is suggested, the Roman economy possessed, by the beginning of Empire, all the necessary prerequisites for developing capitalistic relations, and a part of it was capitalistic by nature. Despite many promising developments, it is argued that the germ inherent in the Roman economy did not grow into a full-fledged organism. Instead, rudimentary capitalism eventually failed to rise to a mature level mostly over the state’s getting almost total control of economic life. And this is, too, an important lesson to draw from Roman history.

Our sixth article, “Social Economy Advancement: From Voluntary to Secure Organizational Commitments to Public Benefit,” sees Helen Haugh (Cambridge Judge Business School) consider the creation of the:

[…] social enterprise – the Community Interest Company (CIC). The CIC is a legal structure designed to permit trading for social purpose and ensure that company assets are committed to community benefit in perpetuity.

The major contribution of the paper is found in its discussion of how a new organizational form emerged in the UK based on mixing two types of existing organizations. This new corporate form was created by the actions of practitioners, activists, lawyers and politicians. Haugh’s article will appeal to those with an interest in social entrepreneurship, especially in the creation of institutions that encourage social entrepreneurship. The combination of different expertises allowed these various groups to pass legislation, which allowed for the creation of the CIC. Another important aspect regarding the passage of how various groups had differing levels of agency and legitimacy. However, agency and legitimacy were both based upon expertise. This article contains a potential lead for management historians who study social entrepreneurship. As scholars can use methods to discover how social entrepreneurship gained legitimacy. Haugh’s work will also appeal to those who have an interest in the junction between theory and practice.

In our final article, “Accounting for Management and Organizational History: Strategies and Conceptions,” Rene Arseneault (Saint Mary’s University, Halifax), Nicholous Deal (Mount Vincent University, Halifax) and Jean Helms Mills (Saint Mary’s University and Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics, Jyväskylä, Finland) revisit the theoretical debate and controversy that has flowed from calls for an “historic turn” within business and management history. In adding to recent debates and controversies, it adopts a middle position in between those who advocate a more traditional history of management and those who support the newer, more “critical” history. In doing so, this article reminds us that the current debate in management history is merely another battle in the long history of the social sciences – between those of differing philosophical assumptions and beliefs. Historians both write history and, through their writings, influence history. One of the arguments of this article is that historical differences are partly the result of actions in the past, suggesting a degree of path dependence that influences historians. One of the reasons for this divergence between countries, it is suggested, is found not only in the fact that the development of business schools has varied from country to country. It is also found in the fact that business and management history emerged in the wake of the Second World War, a time when “social science was hurriedly moving toward a functional and quantitative embrace.” Left hanging in this comment is the increased need for the development of theoretical building and testing. The emphasis shifted from a historical focus to a theoretical one – although in the 1970s, into the 1980s, the historical articles appeared in major journals and history was considered an equal division within the academy of management. The recent rise of the “historic turn,” it is argued, has led to a rediscovery of history within not only management and business history but also the wider public with the typologies developed by Michael Rowlinson and by Mairi Maclean given particular credit for reinvigorating the field.

In relation to the final article, it should be noted that the editors of this journal have been part of the debate (see, for example, Bowden, 2021 and Muldoon, 2021, in the first issue of this journal for 2021). We both find this paper to be evenhanded and thoughtful regarding the emergence of historical models. Our hope is that the field continues to gain respect in the larger community. Part of the reason is that we are now witnessing serious debates on, and the development of, theory on the concept of history. We are also witnessing the development of research in the underpinnings of some of management’s theories. Scholars of all sides should consider this a blessing, as we often lack a consideration of how theories emerge through a social context.