Historical approaches in organizational research

Citation

van Baalen, P. and Bogenrieder, I. (2009), "Historical approaches in organizational research", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 22 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2009.02322aaa.001

Historical approaches in organizational research

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 22, Issue 1

Today we observe a growing interest in historical approaches to management and organization studies. This historic turn, as the increasing interest in historical perspectives has been called (MacDonald, 1996), is accompanied with a rethinking of the role of historical analysis in organization studies. Several authors argue that there is a need for a historic turn to question the “scientistic rhetoric of organization studies” (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004) in which history is not just treated a variable or “a package of narrative events” (Ericson, 2006).

The historic turn further reminds us to the importance of historical consciousness to organization studies. Historical consciousness is not just about knowing the past but, as Jeismann (1985) argues, it refers to the symbiotic relations between interpretation of the past, understanding of a contemporary situation, and perspectives on the future. Historical consciousness is the metanarrative that mediates on the one hand the more “deterministic” historical condition of human beings and on the other hand the “emancipatory” opportunity of human beings to create historical conditions (Karlsson, 2003). The absence of historical consciousness in organizations may result in a disconnection to their past and consequently to the shaping of organizational identities in present and future.

At the moment we can distinguish two dominant ideal types of historical analysis in organizational research, the factual and teleological approach. The factual approach assumes an objective and finished past that needs to be discovered by historians. The ultimate goal is to describe the past as Leopold von Ranke phrased it: “how it essentially was”. One implication of the factual approach is that the chain of causes and effects that has led to the present is coherently presented by historians (Modhorst, 2008). History should not aim at instructing contemporaries about the lessons of the past or at judging the present or the future against the past. History unfolds itself by doing proper historical research. This is the typical historical research conducted by historians.

The teleological approach assumes an ultimate objective which guides the course of events in history. Historical analyses are used to exemplify or to provide historical evidence of causal logics, life cycles, stages in and of organizations. They serve to legitimize alternative theoretical perspectives or current organizational practices. Implicit teleological guidelines force “historical facts” into the straightjacket the author’s theoretical claim. Both historical approaches present a deterministic course of history. However, in the factual approach causal relationships are unraveled while doing historical research (forward determinism), whereas teleological approaches assume unidirectional causality, prior to historical research (backward determinism).

Moreover, historical analyses help us to interprete existing organizational structures and forms not as determined by laws but as a result of decisions in past choice opportunities (Kiesler, 1994). Retrospective interpretations of the past in current organization theory tend to be finalistic and to overlook idiosyncrasies of decision making processes in organizations.

The historic turn in organization studies has elicited a broad-ranging and critical debate on the question how historical analyses can contribute to new insights in organization studies. More importantly it challenges the current historiography of historical analyses of organization studies and helps to escape from the limited choice between factual and teleological approaches. In fact, the historic turn is a more or less a logical consequence of the paradigm discussion in organization studies. If we accept the co-existence of multiple organizational paradigms for our current theoretical analyses, why would not we accept multiplicity of paradigms for understanding our past? History then is no longer viewed as a congealed series of more or less related facts. History is active and invasive in today’s world. It is an open-ended construct.

The debate on the historiography is still going to has resulted in new streams of historical approaches on organizations. Counterfactual, counter narrative and virtual history approaches are recent examples of historical research that tempts to escape from traditional deterministic approaches to history in organizations (Booth, 2003; Maielli and Booth, 2008; Modhorst, 2008). An outstanding example of a critical reexamination of the value of current theoretical concepts with the help of historical material is Freeland’s (2001) study of the multidivisional form at General Motors between 1924 and 1970. This book shows that, contradicting prevailing interpretations, GM during its heydays between 1924 and 1958 did not stick to a “textbook” version of the M-form, which would have implied a strict division between responsibility for strategic and operational decision making. Instead GM repeatedly adapted the decision making structure in the face of changing economic circumstances. By stressing the importance of gaining consent of division managers by top management in defining the firm’s strategy, Freeland uses his historical case-study to outline the limitations of Oliver Williamson’s transaction costs theory that focuses too much on efficiency.

For this special issue we invited historians and management and organization scholars to apply and reflect on relevant theoretical and historiographical perspectives and to enrich them by applying them in concrete historical analyses of organizational phenomena. Moreover, authors are invited to open a new window of opportunity regarding the historic turn. Some of the contributions reveal how history is used for legitimizing current organizational identities and images.

The challenge of the historic turn is a big one as historians and scholars in management and organization are socialized in very different academic tribes, having their own jargon, methods, assumptions and scientific heroes. Whereas the former tend to look at the uniqueness of organizations, the latter tend emphasize the general dimensions of organizations (Kiesler, 1994). In discussing the relationship between sociology and history the historian MacRae said: “Sociology is history with the hard work left out. History is sociology with the brains left out” (quoted in Kiesler, 1994).

For this special issue on Historical Approaches to Organizational Research we selected five papers that attempt to fill the gap between historical and organizational research. The first two papers demonstrate how written histories of organizations can serve different ends. Historical analyses of organizations are no longer the sole province of scientifically trained historians or researchers of organizations. An important consequence of the historic turn is that organizations become increasingly aware of relevance of their historical image for internal and external legitimizations. One might interpret these historiographic papers as already “beyond the historic turn”. Their approach is neither about facticity nor idiosyncacies of historical analyses. Instead, the papers show how history is used as an instrument for current legitimization. This phenomenon is well known from political science when historical text-books are re-written in case of new political regimes.

The next three papers follow theory-testing and theory-generating approaches in historical analyses. Their intention is demonstrating the development and validity of a theoretical claim. However, instead of just doing justice to a theoretical claim the authors also show the idiosyncratic characteristics and circumstances that give rise to the development of a theoretical claim. As a result, these papers demonstrate how historical analyses provide a rich source for putting theoretical claims in a context. These papers show how theories in history can be used to enrich our current concepts and provide a fuller understanding of our current theoretical insights.. Here the slogan of this special issues becomes true: Historia magistra scienciae.

In his article, Brunninge analyzes how two large Swedish companies, the truck maker Scania and the Handelsbanken, purposely make use of history in order to affect strategy processes in line with their strategy processes. The author applies Karlsson’s typology of uses of history and demonstrates how managers in an organizational context purposely create and disseminate conceptions of the past that suit their political purposes. In this article Brunninge makes clear that history is not only an object of study for scholars but, and perhaps more importantly, an instrument of managerial manipulations.

There are many ways by which organizations can present themselves to the outside world. As Rowlinson et al. define corporate histories as a genre of communication which tells the past of an organization and which helps to create the organization’s identity. The objective of the authors is not to study corporate histories as “real” accounts of the past but as textual discourses that can be analyzed from the genre perspective. They analyzed historical narratives of 85 British and American companies from the Fortune Global 500 list. The authors draw some interesting conclusions with respect of the use of corporate histories by organizations. One is that corporate is histories are more than merely a repository of memory for future use. Corporate history is a cultural imperative for every large organization.

From a historical point of view path dependence is a very interesting theoretical concept as it integrates a historical, evolutionary perspective with constructs of organizational theory. Van Driel and Dolfsma first discuss the theoretical underpinnings and argue that the initial conditions as a theoretical construct for path dependence is characterized by vagueness and its empirical application shows serious flaws. The authors’ claim is that these initial conditions should be part of the path dependence analysis. This implies that researchers should study the societal social structure, prior to the path that is taken, in order to understand the direction (the imprint) of the path. A central part of these initial conditions are what the authors call “meta-routines”, which at the same time may create lock-in. They apply their analysis of meta-routines to the famous Toyota Production System.

In the fourth article Karsten et al. report about their case study of organizational transformation and leadership styles during the Centurion Operation at Philips Electronics in the 1990s. The paper shows how a particular (Dionysian) leadership style enacted the initial stage of the transformation process and how later interventions were aligned with existing routines in the organization. What makes this paper interesting is that a combination of organizational constructs (leadership styles, narratives, routines) helps to explain the success of the transformational change at Philips. This multi-theoretical perspective fits very well to historical analyses and bridges the gap between historical analyses without theory and theoretical contributions without history.

The fifth article by Martins describes extensively the historical development of first-tier management. This development is put in the historical context of among other things training system, attitude of primary stakeholders and the broader organizational context. Again, a rich historical analysis is presented where the embedding of the development of first-tier management in more general trends is demonstrated. A next step would be to make clear what we can learn from identifying these trends for the future development of first-tier management.

Peter van Baalen, Irma Bogenrieder