History in Organizations now has over 600 subscribers! It never ceases to amaze me — when I started this, I did not think that there would be that many readers for this kind of blog. A big THANK YOU to everybody!

Contents

1. BAM-CABS Guide to running inclusive events

2. New book alert! Global Enterprise in Australia

3. Hagley Center Fellowships and Grants announcement

1. All Welcome Guide to inclusive, accessible and sustainable events

After my rant last week, a colleague and friend reminded me that there are plenty of free resources out there to support people who actually want to run inclusive, accessible and, increasingly, sustainable events. The key one is the brief “All Welcome” guide published jointly by the British Academy of Management and Chartered Association of Business Schools. It’s free to download, just follow the link: https://www.bam.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/inclusive-accessible-and-sustainable-events.html

2. New book alert: Global Enterprise in Australia

Global Enterprise in Australia

International Business Down Under since Federation

By Simon Ville, Pierre van der Eng, André Sammartino, David Merrett, Monica Keneley

ABSTRACT

For two centuries, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have arrived in waves on Australia’s shores. Highly visible and influential household names among them – Ford, IBM, Kodak, Electrolux, ANZ – but also many smaller, lesser-known enterprises. Foreign MNEs in Australia today account for almost half of our top 2,000 firms and control over A$1.4 trillion of assets. There is much we do not understand about these important institutions, why they chose to invest here, how they entered, and why some firms survived for long periods, while others exited.

The history of MNEs, more than most topics, is inextricably connected to international experience. Across half a century of research, their history has emerged as a vibrant field of investigation in North America, Europe, and, increasingly, Asia. MNE activity in Australia, briefly referenced in some of these studies, formed an important part of the global presence of many firms. This is the first history of foreign MNEs in twentieth-century Australia, filling a major gap in the economic and business history literature of Australia and of the history of international business globally. It integrates the important and distinctive Australian experience with an extensive international and comparative scholarship on big business and MNEs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

International Business in Australia Since Federation

The Contours of Multinational Enterprises and Their FDI in Australia Since 1900

Australia as a Multinational Host

The Evolution of Multinational Enterprise Engagement with Australia

The Design and Management of Australian Subsidiaries

Industry Dynamics

Inside the Enterprise

Conclusion and Prospective

3. Hagley Center Fellowships and Grants announcment

The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware is pleased to announce the recipients of grants and fellowships awarded April 2026. Please note that the next deadline for applications for the exploratory grant and Henry Belin du Pont is June 30th. Here is the link on Hagley Museum and Library’s website for further info and to apply….https://www.hagley.org/research/grants-fellowships.

Exploratory Grant

Louis Bissieres, Associate Professor, Universite Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle: Banking in the Countryside in the Early Republic

Hsiao-Yun Chu, Professor, San Francisco State University: Exquisite Boredom: Ladies fancy work boots and the birth of the leisure crafts

Charlie Colenutt, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Cambridge: Multinational Contractors and the Political Economy of Anglo-American Imperialism, 1880-1918

Adia Cullors, Ph.D. Candidate, New York University: Black Powder: Medicine and Militancy in the Black Atlantic, 1741-1897

Adam Fertig, Teaching Assistant, NYU: Development’s groundwork: American business and environmental review, 1970s-1990s

Leo Garofalo, Professor, Connecticut College: Coca and Opium Counterpoint: Economic Racialization of Products and Laborers in the Andes

Sofia Grant, Ph.D. Candidate, Johns Hopkins University: Designing for Autoimmune Disease: Universal Design, Patients’ Knowledge, and Embodied Experience in Twentieth Century America

Henry Jacob, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University: A Corridor of Capitalism: A History of Ships and Shipping through the Panama Canal

Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Ph.D. Candidate, George Washington University: A Global Environmental History of U.S. Space Infrastructure

Kathleen McHugh, Ph.D. Candidate, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Home Economics is the Solution to all Your Problems: Home Economics, Feminism, and Activism in Twentieth-Century Americs

Flor Isabel Palomino Arana, Independent scholar: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Photographers and their Aesthetics, Techniques and Subjects, Peru, Chile and United States

Mariela Pichardo, Yale University: DuPont (China) Inc.

Hannah Scott Deuchar, Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary University of London: The Arabic Typewriter: Toward a Global History

Andrew David Allan Smith, Associate Professor, Birmingham Business School: Federalizing the Quarter: SEC Reporting Rules and the Rise of Shareholder Primacy of the 1970s

Patrick Sullivan, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University: Signal by Signal

H.B. du Pont Fellowship

Peter Astras, Assistant Teaching Professor, Syracuse University: The Life and Mind of Hudson Maxim

Jasper Cattell, Ph.D. Candidate, Brown University: The World Without Work? The Regulatory Politics of the Work/Environment Divide

Nida Kadayifci, Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University: The Small Business Smokescreen: A Historiographical intervention into Employment Law Exemptions through Family and Medical leave Act, 1984-`993

Anca Lasc, Associate Professor, Pratt College: Toward a Unified Aesthetic of Window Design--the Art, Science, and Business Venture of Window Dressing at the turn of the Twentieth Century

Jonathan Robins, Associate Professor, Michigan Technological University: Forgotten Fibers: Biomaterials in Industry before and after Synthetics

Yen Nie Yong, Senior Lecturer, Kyoto University: Unnaturally Caring: Shaping Female Bodies for Service Labor in Southeast Asia

Brandywine Dissertation Fellowship

Charlotte Leib, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University: An Environmental and Energy History of the New Jersey Meadowlands

Exploratory Grants

Hagley Exploratory Research Grants

These grants support one-week visits by scholars who believe that their project will benefit from Hagley research collections, but need the opportunity to explore them on-site to determine if a Henry Belin du Pont Fellowship application is warranted. Priority will be given to junior scholars with innovative projects that seek to expand on existing scholarship. Applicants should reside more than 50 miles from Hagley, and the stipend is $400. Application deadlines: March 31, June 30 and October 31

Henry Belin du Pont Fellowships

These research grants enable scholars to pursue advanced research and study in the collections of the Hagley Library. They are awarded for the length of time needed to make use of Hagley collections for a specific project. The stipends are for a maximum of eight weeks and are pro-rated at $400/week for recipients who reside further than 50 miles from Hagley, and $200/week for those within 50 miles. Application deadlines: March 31, June 30 and October 31

The Brandywine Dissertation Fellowships

Brandywine Dissertation Fellowship is designed for graduate students who are actively working on their dissertation. A residential fellowship for three to four months duration, it provides $10,000 and free housing on Hagley’s grounds along with an office and other amenities. Brandywine Dissertation fellows are expected to work at Hagley at least four days weekly and to participate in events organized by Hagley’s Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society.

We invite applications from Ph.D. candidates whose research on important historical questions uses Hagley’s research collections. Applications should demonstrate superior intellectual quality, present a persuasive methodology, and show that the dissertation makes significant use of Hagley research materials. Research in Hagley’s collections may take place prior to the fellowship residency. Potential applicants are strongly encouraged to consult with Hagley reference staff at askHagley@Hagley.org prior at to submitting their dossier.

Application Deadline: March 31

And the idea was to make the talk about two kinds of gaps at once: the first is the gaps you experience when you work in inter- or multidisciplinary fields, which describe the difficulties of moving between different epistemic communities. Last week’s post began by considering the need to make our research interesting to more than just our “home” epistemic community.

The second kind of gap is one I have worked on a lot: gaps in the archive, where the historical record is silent. At the Modern British Studies conference, many participants just considered gaps and silences as normal for historians, whether they are in physical archives or digital. That’s nice for the humanities folk, where muddling through passes as a method.

It plays less well with the more “scientist-ic” audiences: business and management, and also transport studies.

And this is kind of why I ended up at the workshop (which was actually very good). I am not a transport person. I use it, but I don’t research it. So when I was first invited, I wanted to have a conversation first, because I was kind of confused. What would I have to say to a transport studies group?

Turns out the concept of the meeting was to provide some knowledge and experience sharing from management & organizational history (or indeed historical organization studies), to transport historians seeking to engage more with transport studies. Because business historians reinvented themselves as MOH to establish a space in business and management. Transport historians, who are reasonably close to business historians, are largely aware of this move and have apparently been considering how it might translate into better engagement with transport studies.

So, what did I do? A very limited crash course in transport studies (more on the how below) and a bit of a consideration of what shape the gap between transport history and transport studies is compared to MOH and business and management. The argument I landed on was gaps. Explaining the unavoidable archival silences through an explicit methodological framework: historical triangulation.

Because you always need to explain to people not familiar with archives why the dataset is not as flawless as expected.

And coincidentally, we just published a piece with our wonderful doctoral student, Guting Shen, about how to do historical triangulation:

Decker, S., Nix, A. and Shen, G. (2025). Minding the gaps: Triangulation strategies for colonial and postcolonial archives. Business History. DOI

OK, it is about the historical records of department stores in Republican China, which we use as worked examples. But, as the discussions at the Modern British Studies conference showed in the previous week, gaps and silences really affect EVERYONE who works with archives. All sorts of reasons for this, more on that below.

So this may be a transport story on the surface, but the underlying problems will be familiar to anyone doing historical research in other fields, or, frankly, anyone working across disciplinary and epistemic boundaries.

Catch-up service:

• Historical methods in organizational and business research: a practical guide (always free)

• Are we entering a digital dark age? Or: Talking to other people (1) (archival silences, born-digital edition)

• AI in peer review (less moral panic, more useful guidance)

Read more

It’s like Groundhog Day – it feels like it was only yesterday (actually it was 2024) that the AOM Management History Division featured three men-only panels. And they are at it again – not sure why I am even surprised; same cast of characters. (Just to be clear, I admire the work of these individuals, which frankly makes this way more disappointing.) I‘m sure they tried (I was asked, but I’m not going – see the FT) and many people are not going to AOM this year, especially from overseas. But this also suggests that there are apparently barely any senior women in the field in the US. Let that sink in and what that says about this field. Because it is all nice and well that I am (yet again) the only one making a point of calling out what is a largely unacceptable practice elsewhere in academia. (I know that some male colleagues in sociology refuse to join male-only panels as a matter of course. At BAM, we have clear policies on this, and a PDW like this would simply not have been accepted.) But it’s not about me being pissed off. It’s about historical research in management looking to all intents and purposes like a retrograde field where you go when the modern world is a bit too much for you. Anyway, info under point 1, and I added a Hoff for you. More excitingly, we have a new CfP on Indigenous Entrepreneurship in Business History, and the next BAM MBH Publishing Historical Research seminar has been announced for 1 October – this time we are talking to Dr Anastasia Sergeeva, University of Bath, about her work on Magnum Photos.

Contents

1. Yet another Manel at AOM MH Division

2. SI CfP for Business History

3. NEW MBH Publishing seminar announced 1 October

1. Another Manel at AOM

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: AOM 2026 PDW

Developing Theory from Historical Research

Sponsors: MH, OMT, TIM, STR, RM

Saturday, Aug 01, 2026 from 8:00 AM to 10:30 AM ET

Submission Deadline: Friday, July 17, 2026

Who is this PDW for?

If you are:

engaged in (or interested in) conducting research with historical data, and doing inductive/abductive (i.e. theory-building) work, and hoping to publish your work in top management journals then this is the PDW for you!

Overview

This PDW brings together a distinguished panel of scholars to stimulate an interactive and developmental exchange on conducting inductive research using historical data. Our core focus will be on the theory-building / theoretical contribution part of the research process – how do we understand the past to inform the present? How do we move from the setting being studied to higher-level conceptualisations, while maintaining a balance between generalisation and contextualization?

Importantly, our aim will be to focus on these questions from a practical standpoint, taking away useful advice that scholars can adopt in their research practices. And for those of you who have the opportunity to discuss ongoing projects with the panelists, you will also get tailored advice for your specific projects.

Panelists

· David Kirsch, University of Maryland

· Andrew Nelson, University of Oregon

· Ryan Raffaelli, Harvard Business School

· Roy Suddaby, University of Victoria

Organizer: Rohin Borpujari, University College London

Structure

1. Panel Talk and Group Q&A: For the first part of the PDW, our panelists will lead exchanges around topics such as which research questions are best suited to historical case studies; how to balance the needs for contextualization vs. generalization in theorizing; how to write up a historical case study for publication in management journals, etc.

2. Roundtables and Individual Feedback: Pre-selected participants will have the opportunity to engage in quick, entrepreneur-style “pitches” to the experts (separated into 4 different roundtables), with a view to receiving developmental feedback specific to their projects.

Each participant will have 20 minutes in total – 10 minutes to describe their project (or project idea) and what areas they would like feedback on, and 10 minutes to receive feedback / engage in discussion with the expert.

How to Apply

Part 1 is open to all attendees and does not require any application in advance.

For Part 2, in order to ensure quality interactions with panelists, we are limiting the number of “pitches” to 16 (i.e. 4 per panelist). If you are interested in receiving feedback on a project that you are currently working on, please submit your interest to r.borpujari@ucl.ac.uk by 11:59 pm ET (Eastern Time) on Friday July 17, 2025.

Specifically, please submit an abstract or overview of your project, including two questions that you would like to ask the panelists to receive feedback about that project. Please keep this document limited to 1 page, single-spaced, in PDF format.

In addition, in your email, please rank order your preference for which panellist roundtable you would like to be a part of (with the number “1” referring to your first choice panellist and “4” referring to your fourth choice panellist).

Note: In addition to the 1-page abstract, you may, if you wish, submit a theoretical model or diagram that you are working on in case your project is at a more advanced stage and you would like comments on the theoretical model you are building.

If you have any questions about the PDW or the application process, please feel free to reach out at r.borpujari@ucl.ac.uk

------------------------------

Rohin Borpujari

UCL - University of London

LONDON

2. Special Issue for Business History

Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond:

Institutional Negotiation, Exclusion and Resilience

CFP Launch Date: 1 June 2026

Overview

This Special Issue examines Indigenous entrepreneurial agency under colonial rule, treating colonial institutions as both economic constraints and sociopolitical structures that shaped market access, legal standing and accumulation strategies. Defining Indigenous peoples is challenging given their diversity and presence across every continent. Scholars have nonetheless identified a number of broadly shared characteristics, including prior inhabitation of a territory before the arrival of later settler or dominant populations, some form of subjugation by those populations, the retention of distinct socio-cultural practices and institutions, a deep attachment to ancestral lands and resources, economic arrangements that are often, though not always, oriented around subsistence, and an association with distinctive languages (Peredo et al., 2004, pp. 5–6).

We invite business historical accounts of how entrepreneurs in colonised societies navigated, contested and reworked the rules of commerce, especially where access to courts, licensing, property rights, banking and credit markets was restricted or selectively enforced. Building on recent scholarship calling for a rethinking of entrepreneurship (Lubinski et al., 2025), growing attention to Indigenous and social entrepreneurship in the Global South (Colbourne, Peredo, & Henriques, 2024; Prouchet, 2025), and calls to engage more directly with colonial and postcolonial contexts and legacies in business history (Austin, Dávila, & Jones, 2017; MacKenzie et al., 2021, 2023; Decker, 2022), the Special Issue brings institutions and agency into the same analytical frame.

Objectives and Scope

Submissions should engage one or more of the following questions:

• Entrepreneurship under legal and financial exclusion: How did Indigenous entrepreneurs respond to constraints in courts, licensing, taxation, banking, property rights, labour regimes and credit markets? Relevant submissions might examine colonial courts, licensing, taxation and property rights as constraints or resources for Indigenous enterprise; financial exclusion and entrepreneurial responses through credit markets, banking, informal and hybrid finance; and the emergence of early Indigenous entrepreneurial projects and their historical significance in the context of colonialism and beyond.

• Institutional negotiation and boundary work: How did entrepreneurial actors exploit institutional gaps, navigate plural legal orders, reinterpret colonial rules, and/or mobilise intermediaries and brokers? Submissions might address entrepreneurial boundary work across plural legal orders; and brokerage and intermediation in the politics of market access, including gender, race, caste and ethnicity as cross-cutting dimensions.

• Resilience as strategy: What specific mechanisms sustained enterprise under constraint and with what distributive consequences? Submissions might explore cooperative, mutual-aid and associational forms as economic strategy in late-colonial settings; diasporic, kinship and inter-regional networks in trade, production and credit under colonial regulation; and moments of late-colonial economic nationalism and early decolonisation (c. 1940s–1970) as sites of institutional reconfiguration.

• Innovation as resistance: What were the mechanisms of technology adoption and adaptation through which entrepreneurs offered alternatives that subverted or circumvented colonial hegemony? Relevant submissions might, for example, address technology, innovation and entrepreneurial market response in early and late industrial colonial capitalism (1880–1940), as well as comparative or connected histories that explicitly engage the shared conceptual lens across cases.

Methodologically, we welcome submissions grounded in business historical approaches, including archival research, oral history, biography, microhistory, and comparative or connected history, that make clear empirical and interpretive contributions to the Special Issue’s themes. Engagement with postcolonial scholarship, subaltern studies, and critical perspectives on firms, markets and institutions is welcome, but not required.

We particularly encourage contributions that draw on a wide range of primary sources to recover Indigenous actors, experiences and strategies, such as company records, court records, licensing files, banking archives, trading accounts, petitions, newspapers and vernacular-language materials. Authors wishing to discuss unconventional sources or strategies for overcoming archival silences are warmly invited to contact the guest editors.

Timeline

Informal enquiries welcome: June-September 2026

Abstract / proposal deadline (800–1,000 words): 1 October 2026

Decisions on abstracts: 1 November 2026

Paper-development workshop(s): Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University

Full paper submission deadline: 1 May 2027

First-round peer-review decisions: September 2027

Revised paper deadline: 1 February 2028

Final revision deadline: 1 May 2028

Final acceptance target: June 2028

Expected online publication and launch: Autumn 2028

Expected print publication: Early to mid-2029

References

Austin, G., Dávila, C., & Jones, G. (2017). The alternative business history: Business in emerging markets. Business History Review, 91(3), 537–569.

Colbourne, R., Peredo, A.M., & Henriques, I. (2024). Indigenous entrepreneurship? Setting the record straight. Business History, 66(2), 455–477.

Decker, S. (2022). Postcolonial transition and global business history: British multinational companies in Ghana and Nigeria. Routledge.

Lubinski, C., Prouchet, L., Ferri, C., Jepsen, N.C. & Lei, W. (2025). Rethinking the histories and ideologies of entrepreneurship. Management & Organizational History. Online First.

MacKenzie, N.G., Perchard, A., Miller, C., & Forbes, N. (2021). Business–government relations and national economic models. Business History, 63(8), 1239–1252.

MacKenzie, N.G., Perchard, A., Miller, C., & Forbes, N. (Eds.) (2023). Varieties of capitalism over time. Routledge.

Peredo, A.M., Anderson, R.B., Galbraith, C.S., Honig, B., & Dana, L.P. (2004). Towards atheory of indigenous entrepreneurship. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 1(1/2), 1–20.

Prouchet, L. (2025). Connecting the dots: Business history research on social entrepreneurship in the Global South. Business History. Online First.

Submission Requirements

Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract or proposal for initial consideration. Submissions should be approximately 800–1,000 words and clearly set out the article’s research question, historical scope (including timeframe and location), sources and methodology, and anticipated contribution to the literature. Please also provide a tentative title, author name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information.

Proposals should be sent by 1 October 2026 to himadri@xlri.ac.in, with the other editors copied in: marktadajewski@gmail.com, andrew.perchard@otago.ac.nz, and zpittaki001@dundee.ac.uk. The email subject line should read: “CFP – Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond Special Issue.”

Formatting and Length: Final papers should adhere to Business History guidelines (typically in the range of 8,000–10,000 words, including notes and references). Authors will be provided detailed instructions for manuscript preparation upon acceptance of proposals. We welcome informal inquiries if you have questions about the fit of a topic or the preparation of your proposal. All articles will be submitted through the Submission Portal for the journal in order to be peer-reviewed before acceptance for publication.

Guest Editors

Himadri Roy Chaudhuri, Ph.D. in Marketing (University of Calcutta, India) is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Culture at the Xavier School of Business (XLRI), India. Dr. Chaudhuri has published widely in leading international journals, including the Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Homosexuality, and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, among others. His scholarship contributes to critical perspectives in marketing, often bridging cultural theory, ethics and policy concerns.

Mark Tadajewski, Ph.D. in Marketing (University of Leicester), is Honorary Professor of Marketing at the University of York, Visiting Professor at the Open University, and Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research critically interrogates the foundations of marketing theory and practice, with particular attention on how geopolitics shape the discipline. In business history, his work has examined alternative forms of business education and their influence on sales and managerial practice.

Andrew Perchard, PhD in History (University of Strathclyde) is Honorary Research Professor at Otago Business School, Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka / University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa–New Zealand, and Visiting Professor, Birkbeck, University of London, and Honorary Visiting Professor, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, both UK. His research has focused particularly on the subject of business–government relations and corporate political activity, deglobalisation and globalisation, as well as regional development and energy and industrial policy.

Zoi Pittaki, PhD in Economic History (University of Glasgow) is a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Dundee School of Business. Her research interests include entrepreneurship and institutions, entrepreneurship and growth, social entrepreneurship and historical institutionalism.

3. Publishing Historical Research in Management Journals 4

Staged by the BAM Management and Business History Special Interest Group

10am – 11.30am BST1 October 2026

Description

Join us for our next MBH webinar on publishing historical research in top journals in management and business history! This interactive event will feature scholars who share their experiences of successfully positioning their historical work for key journals. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about how to develop approaches and strategies for publishing in top journals and build knowledge and skills around how to position historical research in management and business history journals.

We will be joined by Dr Anastasia Sergeeva, whose research focuses on entrepreneurial reasoning and value-laden aspects of innovating and organizing.

Her co-authored article in the Strategic Management Journal is available open access here: https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.3727 Please read the article in advance of the webinar for an in-depth discussion with the author and other participants.

Provider Information

BAM Management and Business History Special Interest Group

Who Should Attend?

The event speaks to Sections A1 and A2, as detailed in the BAM Framework.

Speakers

Dr Anastasia Sergeeva

Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), University of Bath School of Management

Guting Shen

PhD Student, University of Birmingham

Facilitator

Professor Stephanie Decker

Professor of Strategy, Birmingham Business School

Dr Nicholas Wong

SIG Co-Chair

Dr Anna Spadavecchia

SIG Co-Chair

Benefits of attending

• Develop strategies to publish historical research;

• Build knowledge and skills how to position work for different types of journals;

• Gain deeper insights into review and editorial processes.

Contact

Please contact the BAM Office at eventsandcommunications@bam.ac.uk with any queries.

Event Fee

BAM Members and Student Members: Free
Non-Members: £60

If you are booking multiple paid events as a Non-Member, it may be cheaper for you to purchase a BAM Membership as nearly all BAM Events are free or at a discounted rate for Members.

For more information about Becoming a BAM Member, please visit BAM Membership

Registration closes on 30th September 2026 at 23:59 BST

• Tech Stack: Using AI for your Research Communications

• Reading Club: Connected to a Sinking Ship by Chris Hartwell

• Tech Stack: AI & Peer Review

Last week I gave a talk at the Modern British Studies conference in Birmingham. Yes, I also didn't know British Studies was a thing before I was approached. I’ve only been to African Studies conferences before, so I was tickled. My stuff is only British insofar as I am located in Britain.

But I was interested because it was about email and the internet, so the history actually overlaps with the time period I have been in Britain. My earliest internet and email were in Germany, but by the time MP3 players and social media became a major thing, I was on these fair isles. Pretty much shortly after we learned that Y2K would not end all civilisation as we knew it, really. (I was at HBS when Lehman Brothers collapsed (which is why I nearly missed the Northern Rock bank run), but back when the depression and austerity started.)

To give you an idea of how long that is, consider this: when I am in Germany, I unironically expect trains to be on time. Yes, that long.

Back to (Modern) British Studies — in many ways, it was like other area studies meets. I met a lot of historians, a smattering of vaguely sociological people and those with a penchant for literature and culture. Our panel was great: Christine Grandy (Lincoln) talked about her research on email spam — inspired! People (and journalists) were ominously forecasting the death of the internet and email as we know it, c. 2002. It was good to be reminded. Especially of the many Nigerian princes in distress. When I check my spam folder now, it’s a mix of advertising and threatening emails about my online watching habits (really, I’m the wrong mark here). So, quick check: yes, the internet still feels like a darker place now, but my nostalgia has significantly reduced.

Laura Carter (Paris) reflected on Friends United and her “lurking” in online fora to research the history and memories of a cohort from a specific school. She did announce her presence as a researcher, but she is not an actively engaged participant in these mnemonic communities. It’s what Massa & O’Mahony (2021) call “non-participant observation” — worth knowing they did it on 4Chan. Ideal place to lurk — or maybe not.

One attendee told me that my talk was very helpful, as he had now decided against touching any digital sources. I guess any impact is impact, no? I was also massively upstaged by some pigeons moving into Muirhead Tower. Definitely one of the more exciting talks to deliver.

But overall, attending a conference outside my field made me consider how we can make our research relevant to scholars in other fields and disciplines, and how many of our concerns may be shared but divided by different languages and conventions. And I am doing it all again this week!

Let’s get started with email and its past and future history. My talk had the deliberately melodramatic title: digital cornucopia, or new dark ages? It was aimed at historians and other scholars thinking about how anyone will write the history of the twenty-first century. But the argument matters just as much for those of us who study organisations, firms and management, because not just the corporate record is changing under our feet, but organizational activity itself is, and most of us have not yet noticed.

Read more

Happy Monday everyone! It’s another bumper week, with an extended deadline for the Tübingen-Glasgow summer school in business history, and excellent business historical piece published on ASML, programme and registration details for the World Congress of Business History in Toronto, Canada, this year, and the Canadian Business History Association recommends the Desjardin Group’s historical museum.

Contents

1. NARTI Writing Retreat, online

2. World Congress of Business History, Toronto, programme

3. Group Desjardins Historical Museum, Canada

4. Tübingen-Glasgow Summer School extended deadline

5. Second City History and Economics Meeting (SCHEMe)

6. Business history of ASML

1. NARTI Online Training & Development

Write Here, Write Now Live Coaching Writing Retreat

With Will Medd

Mornings 13-16 July 2025 (09.30-13.00– UK time)

Online via Zoom

REGISTER HERE

Creating a productive writing habit is a challenge for many writers, often leading to frustration and a feeling of never having done enough. That can develop into anxiety and a sense that ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘I shouldn’t be here’. It’s easy to find yourself putting off writing until it starts to feel too late. While some people respond well to the pressure to write to a high standard, for others it can be the main hindrance to their writing.

Experience dedicated, focused and productive writing time
✍️
Gain confidence, motivation and skills to manage your mood
✍️
Develop greater awareness of what gets in the way and how to overcome it
✍️
Craft strategies for consistent and productive writing practice in balance with your life
✍️
Learn from the collective wisdom of the group

WriteHere, RightNow offers a unique format, for writers at any stage of their process and career, which combines the space of a writing retreat with the provocation of live coaching. The combination of retreat and live coaching means that, while working on a current piece of writing, participants also engage in a series of coaching-based inquiries at three levels:

1. Establishing an effective writing practice while getting writing done. WriteHere, RightNow offers a structure designed to enable you to write, to approach editing in an effective way, and to hold up a mirror to your own habits and strategies in order to establish an intentional approach that works for you.

2. Sustaining motivation and overcoming barriers such as self-doubt and ‘the imposter’. In response to the challenges felt by many participants, our group coaching engages with issues around core motivation, overcoming fear and insecurity, finding inherent confidence, and establishing effective intentions and goals.

3. Who are you as a writer? Letting go of assumptions of who you are trying to be or thinking you should be. We work with what matters to you, with your strengths, with your vision of your writing’s purpose.

Find out more about the retreat and Will Medd www.willmedd.com

There are limited places available for this retreat. If you would like to join us and can commit to participating in all sessions, please complete the registration form using the link at the top of this page.

Many thanks, Jo

Jo Garrick

Researcher Training and Development Manager

2. World Congress of Business History - Registration Open!

The registration for the World Congress of Business History is open! Taking place at the University of Toronto from July 27-31, 2026, the Congress will bring together business historians from around the world and is an opportunity to learn about cutting edge research.

If you have questions about the Congress you can reach out to us at ed@cbha.ca

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

CLICK HERE FOR PRELIMINARY PROGRAM

3. Canadian Business History Museum

A Fresh Take on the History of the Desjardins Group

By: Pierre-Olivier Maheux, Historian at the Desjardins Group and CBHA Member

Are you familiar with Alphonse and Dorimène Desjardins? In 1900, they founded

Canada’s first credit union—or caisse populaire, as it was known at the time.

Over the years, it’s grown into Desjardins Group, the largest cooperative financial group in Canada and a worldwide leader.

This remarkable business history story began in their home in Lévis, just across the river from Quebec City. Today, Maison Alphonse-Desjardins is a museum that’s open to the public free of charge. Few financial institutions in Canada offer such a rich showcase of their history. The house has been fully restored and takes visitors back to 1906, offering a window into the Desjardins household and the place where the cooperative’s first members conducted their transactions. A new permanent exhibition, From Them to You. Alphonse and Dorimène: A Collective Journey, has just opened. It presents a modern, interactive interpretation of the birth of Desjardins Group, designed with families in mind.

It’s a must for anyone who’s interested in business history. If you’re visiting the

Quebec City area, come say hi! To learn more about the museum, click here.

Un regard neuf sur l’histoire du Mouvement Desjardins

Par: Pierre-Olivier Maheux, historien au Mouvement Desjardins et membre de l’ACHA

Connaissez-vous Alphonse et Dorimène Desjardins? Ils sont à l’origine de la fondation de la première caisse populaire au Canada en 1900. Au fil des ans, elle est devenue le Mouvement Desjardins, le plus important groupe financier coopératif au Canada et parmi les premiers au monde.

Cette incroyable histoire a commencé dans leur résidence de Lévis, non loin de Québec. Transformée en musée, la Maison Alphonse Desjardins est accessible gratuitement. Rares sont les institutions financières au Canada qui offrent au public une telle mise en valeur de leur histoire. La reconstitution de la maison comme elle était en 1906 permet de découvrir à la fois le lieu où les membres réalisaient leurs transactions financières et le cadre de la vie familiale des Desjardins. Une toute nouvelle exposition permanente, intitulée D’eux à nous, Alphonse et Dorimène : une aventure collective, vient d’être inaugurée. Elle propose une lecture actuelle et accessible de la naissance du Mouvement Desjardins dans un environnement interactif conçu pour les familles.

La visite est un incontournable pour ceux et celles que l’histoire d’entreprise passionne. Vous êtes de passage dans la grande région de Québec? Venez nous voir! Pour en savoir plus sur le musée, cliquez ici.

4. Tübingen-Glasgow Summer School extended deadline

The deadline for the summer school has been extended to 15 June (not 5 June). More information here: https://uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/philosophische-fakultaet/fachbereiche/geschichtswissenschaft/seminareinstitute/neuere-geschichte/personen/arbeitsbereich-neuere-regionalgeschichte/summer-school/

5. Second City History and Economics Meeting (SCHEMe)

Volume 3, MMXXVI

Venue: Birmingham Business School, University House – Workshop Room: TBC

Kindly supported by an Economic History Society “Events and Activities” grant.

Thursday 25 June

11:00-11:30: Coffee and Welcome

11:30-12:30: Session One: Politics

Mona Morgan-Collins, KCL

Women and the Adoption of Proportional Representation in Norway

Yi Min, Birmingham

Perpetuation of Political Loyalty: Evidence from the Chinese Communist Movement

12:30-14:00: Lunch

14:00-15:00: Session Two: American Capitalism

Max Posch, Exeter

Doux Commerce: Markets, Culture, and Cooperation in 1850-1920 U.S.

Ruveyda Nur Gozen, Cardiff

Business Dynamism and Innovation: Evidence from a Novel 19th Century Microdata

15:00-15:30: Coffee

15:30-16:30: Session Three: Labour

Yuzuru Kumon, Manchester

Gendered Labor, Marriage, and Structural Transformation: Industrializing Japan

Meredith Paker, Oxford

Structural Change, Labor Reallocation, and Mismatch During the Great Depression in Britain

19:00: Dinner (by invitation)

Friday 26 June

10:00-11:00: Session Four: Public Policy

Emily Chung, Cambridge

Slum Clearances and Urban Dislocation in Manchester, 1860-1880

Eric Strobl, Bern

The Jamaica Life Expectancy Paradox: The Role of the Hookworm Campaign

11:00-11:30: Coffee

11:30-12:30: Keynote

Alex Trew, Glasgow

The Death and Life of Great British Cities

12:30-14:00: Lunch

14:00-15:00: Session Five: Legacies

Lydia Assouad, LSE

The Arab Slave Trade and the Diffusion of Islam in Africa

Sebastian Ellingsen, Bristol

Communities of Commerce: The Legacy of Chinese Immigration on Java

6. Great piece on the business history of ASML

The Works in Progress Newsletter

How ASML took over the world

Neil Hacker explains how Europe built a technology giant…

Read more

a month ago · 152 likes · 9 comments · Works in Progress

The Research Detective

Last week, I released the first AI-generated video in a series that will illustrate some key ideas that I have been working on with collaborators over the last few years: Adam Nix, David Kirsch and Omeghie Okoyomoh.

I should say they knew nothing about this.

This is the result:

People don’t watch long content on YouTube, at least not in the informative/instructional space. So I wanted to do something that is bite-sized and digestible. Also, turns out that AI-generated video is one way to burn your tokens real fast.

1. So, for starters, and in contrast to other AI-generated research communications collateral I discussed before, beware: this will cost you.

2. This is not quick. Of course, it’s quick (and cheap) compared to actual video production. But the short video took me a few hours to make.

In fairness, I enjoyed those hours learning something new and being definitely entertained by the creative process.

I used ElevenLabs, which was incredibly easy and quick to figure out. If you are looking for a cheaper option, check out the AI Realist here on Substack — she has resources on using the cheaper Chinese AI models, including for video generation. (Do note that she runs this as a business, so detailed advice is not usually free.)

After the paywall, the explainer of how I went about creating the series and the first short video. As I said, it is not cheap, so if you want to know more, you will have to spend money one way or another… Also, now you know what I spend the subscription pocket money on — all reinvested in the service. ;-)

Read more

Another bumper week, two book announcements, one US and one Germany, a call for applications for a doctoral summer school in business and economic history, and the OAP workshop will run its events in Copenhagen, Denmark shortly.

Contents

1. CfA: The Tübingen & Glasgow International PhD Summer School

2. 6th Organizations, Artifacts & Practice (OAP) workshop and its pre-events

3. New book announcement: “Order of Business”

4. New issue of Essays in Economic & Business History

5. New book announcement by AKKU, and changing series editors

1. Call for Applications: University of Tübingen & University of Glasgow Fifth International PhD Summer School

15-17 September 2026, Tübingen, Germany.

Businesses and Regions at the Brink: Companies, Clusters and (Un-)Successful Transformations (1800-2025)

We are pleased to announce the return of the biannual University of Tübingen & University of Glasgow International PhD Summer School in Business & Economic History – which returns for its fifth iteration since its foundation in 2017.

The University of Tübingen via its Initiative of Excellence provides funding for an intensive three-day event aimed at PhD students and early career researchers working on any topic that overlaps with the theme of the school (for more details, see “Further Notes for Applicants” below). Students need not be business or economic historians, but an historical engagement with the themes are essential. Students will be hosted in the historic town of Tübingen and will present, debate and discuss their works-in-progress with leading international scholars within a world-class university.

The school aims to provide doctoral students with an overview of relevant research and innovative tools and methodologies in the fields of business and economic history. It is the fifth event in this series organised jointly by the Seminar für Neuere Geschichte (University of Tübingen) and the Centre for Business History in Scotland (University of Glasgow).

The school will take the form of presentations from students (c.25 minutes) on an aspect of their research/PhD that pertains to the school’s themes, and workshops/masterclasses hosted by established experts in the field. The aims of the school are:

1. to deepen students’ understanding of current themes in historical research of crises and transformations in business/economic history (and how this can inform their own work);

2. to enhance research skills and employability through masterclasses on methods for researching and writing history;

3. to explore the main theoretical underpinnings particular to business and economic history broadly and these topics specifically; and

4. to provide a welcoming and convivial environment in which students can discuss their research with leading scholars and peers.

Students will benefit from the experience of academics from Tübingen, Glasgow and beyond. Funding will cover flights and/or trains (up to an agreed limit, to be reimbursed after the school), accommodation (shared twin rooms), lunches, and the conference meal for c.10 students. There will also be limited space for applicants who wish to self-fund or who have received funding from their own institution. Those interested in attending the summer school should e-mail the following documents to the organisers, Dr Daniel Menning and Dr Christopher Miller.

1. a brief CV (two pages maximum);

2. a summary of their PhD (two pages maximum); and

3. a title and abstract for their desired presentation topic, which should incorporate one or more major themes of the student’s PhD (one page maximum). A summary of a thesis as a whole is not acceptable.

While not required, applicants are strongly encouraged to submit with their materials an example of a work-in-progress (e.g., a draft chapter, article, or working paper), preferably in English, German, or French. Please note, however, that all presentations and discussions will be in English.

The deadline for applications is 5 June 2026 at 4pm UK time/5pm German time. A maximum of 12 funded applicants will be selected and notified shortly afterwards.

For more information, go to the website.

2. Provisional programmes and last chance to register!

Please find attached the provisional program for the 16th Organizations, Artifacts & Practice (OAP) workshop and its pre-events (the Geopolitical & Historical Organization Studies Workshop and the Dauphine Philosophy Workshop).

From June 3 to 4, CBS will host OAP and DPW. The event will include a pre-event at the French Embassy (GeoHos 2026) on June 2.

- To register for OAP and DPW 2026: https://www.tilmeld.dk/oap2026

- To register for GeoHos 2026: https://forms.gle/Pahitp2Nav4QhLp29

Looking forward to meeting you in Copenhagen!

3. New book release announcement

UNC Press announces the publication of Order of Business: The Golden Age of Fraternity and Its Legacy of Inequality by Pamela A. Popielarz. Because of your interest in the subject, the author suggested that we contact you personally. For more information on exam copies and how to purchase, see below.

Order of Business: The Golden Age of Fraternity and Its Legacy of Inequality

by Pamela A. Popielarz

Though the industrial revolution pushed Americans into radically new modes of living, working, and organizing, patriarchy and white supremacy survived in the new institutions of the industrial economy. Fraternal orders flourished so spectacularly between the Civil War and World War I that this era—the peak of the industrial revolution—is known as the Golden Age of Fraternity. In this work of historically informed sociology, Pamela A. Popielarz explores the hidden impact of fraternal orders on systemic inequalities in American business. Most orders welcomed only white men, yet members ranged from capitalist elites to wage workers. Popielarz analyzes the Freemasons and the Knights of Pythias, illuminating who they were, what they aimed to do, and how they adopted novel business practices during the Golden Age. In doing so, she reveals the collective imprint of fraternal orders on business culture and offers new ways to understand contemporary racial and gender inequalities.

“An engaging, beautifully written, and highly original analysis of the economic life and legacies of the Golden Age of fraternalism in the United States that builds on our understanding of how fraternities both contributed to upward mobility and exacerbated patterns of inequality.”

—Elisabeth S. Clemens, author of Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State

“Popielarz offers a new understanding of an important population of American voluntary associations in their heyday and builds on this contribution to make an innovative argument about how these organizations sustain inequality. This is an important book that significantly advances the sociological and historical literature on voluntary organizations and American civil society.”

—Lynette Spillman, author of Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American TradeAssociations

Pamela A. Popielarz is associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago.

288 pages $29.95 paperback

For more information and to read an excerpt, visit the book page.

Electronic exam copies are also now available and are free to instructors.
Visit the For Educators page on our website for details.

And, when you visit our site, take advantage of our current online promotion – save 40 percent off any UNC Press book – and if your order totals $75.00, shipping is FREE. Visit www.uncpress.org – and use promo code 01DAH40 at checkout.

Book Reviewers/Media: PDFs are available for book reviewers and other media. To make your request, contact publicity@uncpress.org.

4. New issue of Essays in Economic & Business History is out!

The editorial team of Essays in Economic & Business History is pleased to announce the publication of Volume 43 (2025). The full volume, with all articles available open access, is available here. This issue brings together new research that reflects the journal’s continued commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and rigorous empirical and historical analysis.

We welcome submissions of original research articles, as well as proposals for special issues. Scholars working in economic history, business history, and related fields are encouraged to submit their work to Essays in Economic & Business History as an outlet for their work.

Articles in this volume include:

• Susie J. Pak, “How to Be a Success in Business: Storytelling and Belonging in Finance”

• Peter Coclanis, “Rethinking Overseas Chinese Business in Singapore and Malaya, c. 1880-1940”

• Keith Hollingsworth, “Building Capital for Legitimacy: J.B. Blayton’s Path to Success in Segregated Atlanta”

• Manolis Manioudis and Dimitra Yiardoglou, “Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Economic History”

• Noah Trudeau, “Licensing Emigrant Agents and African American Migration from the Carolinas, 1870-1900”

5. News from the Critical Business History Group in Germany

English text follows below.

Vor wenigen Tagen ist der nächste Band in der AKKU-Schriftenreihe erschienen. Er handelt von “Migration und Unternehmen” und wurde von Nele Falldorf, Nina Kleinöder und mir herausgegeben.

https://brill.com/display/title/73234

Wir möchten uns noch einmal ganz herzlich bei Euch für die Begutachtung der Beiträge und die konstruktiven Hinweise bedanken. Hiervon hat der Sammelband enorm profitiert!

Gleichzeitig möchten wir die Gelegenheit nutzen, um über Änderungen in der Reihenherausgeberschaft zu informieren. Die bisherigen Reihenherausgeber Juliane Czierpka, Rouven Janneck, Nina Kleinöder, Martin Lutz und ich sind bereits vor einiger Zeit aus dem AKKU-Vorstand ausgeschieden und haben mit dem aktuell erschienenen Band die noch von uns angestoßenen Projekte zu Ende geführt. Fortan wird der neue AKKU-Vorstand die Reihenherausgeberschaft übernehmen. Mit dem Band von Daniel Sobanski (https://brill.com/display/title/74872) steht auch schon ein weiterer Titel fest.

English:

A few days ago, the next volume in the AKKU series was published. It deals with “Migration and Business” and was edited by Nele Falldorf, Nina Kleinöder, and me.

https://brill.com/display/title/73234

We would once again like to extend our sincere thanks to you for reviewing the contributions and for the constructive feedback. The edited volume has benefited enormously from this!

At the same time, we would like to inform you of changes to the series editorship. The previous series editors Juliane Czierpka, Rouven Janneck, Nina Kleinöder, Martin Lutz, and I stepped down from the AKKU board some time ago and have now completed the projects we had initiated with the current volume. Going forward, the new AKKU board will take over the series editorship. A further title has already been confirmed for the volume by Daniel Sobanski (https://brill.com/display/title/74872).

This piece is a bit of a first for the Reading Club — the first quantitative article we are reading here. My ignorance on the finer points of quants technique shall be offset in the webinar by a very knowledgeable discussant, Ms Hailin (Helen) Lu, one of my doctoral students, who knows her quantitative tools.

And it is a first in a different way — the piece positions itself as methodologically abductive. More on that later.

After the paywall, the detailed review — for the true aficionados of History in Organization. ;-)

Read more

In June, the BAM MBH SIG will be speaking to Prof Christopher Hartwell about his recent JOM article — stay tuned for the Reading Club coverage coming soon! Hagley History Hangout has published its summer schedule, the World Economic History Congress in Montevideo, Uruguay, 2028 has opened its call for panels, and the new table of contents for Enterprise & Society is out.

Contents

1. Webinar on Publishing Historical Research in Management by BAM

2. Hagley History Hangout Summer 2026 schedule

3. WEHC 2028 Congress opens submission

4. Table of Contents: Enterprise & Society

1. Webinar on Publishing Historical Research in Management by BAM

We are pleased to announce the BAM Management and Business History SIG‘s upcoming event for Publishing Historical Research in Management Journals on 1st June 2026 from 12:00 - 13:30 BST.

This interactive event will feature scholars who share their experiences of successfully positioning their historical work for key journals. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about how to develop approaches and strategies for publishing in top journals and build knowledge and skills around how to position historical research in management and business history journals.

We will be joined by Prof Christopher Hartwell, who is investigating how firms do business in autocratic states. His article in the Journal of Management is available open access here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01492063251359201

Please read the article in advance of the webinar for an in-depth discussion with the author and other participants

1 June 2026 Publishing Historical Research in Management Journals 3Staged by the BAM Management and Business History Special Interest GroupONLINE - Workshop

Join us by registering by 23:59 UK time the day before the event.

Contact

Please contact the BAM Office at eventsandcommunications@bam.ac.uk with any queries.

2. Hagley History Hangouts SUMMER 2026

History Hangouts are pre-recorded virtual events released every two weeks by the Center for History of Business, Technology, and Society. Each features an in-depth conversation with an author, researcher, or staff member about historical events documented in Hagley’s collections. They are conducted by Roger Horowitz, Center Director; Gregory Hargreaves, Assistant Director; and Benjamin Spohn, Oral History Program Manager. Recordings are releasedon the date listed and will remain available subsequently.

WWW.HAGLEY.ORG/HHH

• MAY 25 International Geophysics in the Interwar Period with Erik Isberg, KTH Institute of Technology and University of Copenhagen

• JUN 8 Menace of Prosperity: NYC’s Struggle for Economic Development

  1865-1981 with Daniel Wortel-London, Bard College

• JUN 22 Awash: Sensation, Infiltration, and the Bather in Queer and Trans

  Art with Jay Buchanan, Washington University in St. Louis

• JUL 6 Credit to the Nation: Eastern European Jewish Immigrant

  Bankers and the Shaping of America with Rebecca Kobrin

• JUL 20 Susquehanna Steam: An Energy History of

  Northeastern Pennsylvania, with Nancy Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• AUG 3 Supplying Extraction: DuPont and the Chemistry of Mining in Chile

  with Angela Vergara, California State University at Los Angeles

• AUG 17 Divided Environment: The Splitting of Workplace and

  Environmental Regulation with Jasper Cattell, Brown University

• AUG 31 Solar Challenger: Energy, Environment, and the Spectacle of Solar

  Aviation, 1976-1981 with Karlyn Allenbrand, University of Delaware

3. WEHC Announcement of the 2028 Congress

Perhaps the most important announcement of the 2025 General Assembly was the location of the 2028 World Economic History Congress, which will be held in Montevideo, Uruguay from 24-28 July, 2028. The Congress coincides with the 300th anniversary of Montevideo’s foundation. The Congress theme, unfortunately increasingly relevant, is World Powers and Conflicts. We are very excited to return to Latin America for the first time since the Buenos Aires Congress of 2002!

We will have two calls for sessions for this Congress. The first call is now open. Sessions proposals are due September 14, 2026, and can be submitted on the Congress website (https://wehcmontevideo2028.org/call-for-sessions/)

Call for bids for host cities – 2031 and beyond

We have also opened the call for bids for host cities for the World Economic History Congress. This will appear on the website shortly. We invite full bids for the 2031 Congress and expressions of preliminary interest for the 2034 Congress. Please see detailed call on website.

New contact information for IEHA Secretary General

As announced at the General Assembly, we will be phasing out the iehaofficial@gmail.com address as it attracts too much spam. We have a contact form on the IEHA website (https://www.ieha-wehc.org/contact/) or you can reach me on my LSE e-mail address.

4. New issue of Enterprise & Society

Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026

Published Online May 2026

Article

Caste Embeddedness and Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Contemporary India

Amrita Roy
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 383 - 416
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10097 Published Online on 13 October 2025

The Firm, the Bank, and the Family: Military Intelligence and the Wallenbergs in Sweden s Cold War

Rikard Westerberg
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 417 - 446
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10100 Published Online on 23 October 2025

Corrigendum

The Firm, the Bank and the Family: Military Intelligence and the Wallenbergs in Sweden s Cold War CORRIGENDUM

Rikard Westerberg
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 447 - 447
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10107 Published Online on 6 November 2025

Article

The American Legion Film Service and the Obstinate, Indifferent and Cold-Blooded Exhibitor : Independent Distribution and the Emergence of Silent-Era Hollywood

Mark T. Hauser
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 448 - 472
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10103 Published Online on 18 November 2025

The Dawn of Shareholder Value: The Normalization of the Hostile Takeover in the UK 1952 1954

Andrew Johnston
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 473 - 502
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10101 Published Online on 18 November 2025

Unintended Cluster Emergence: Revisiting Francoist Industrial Policy in the Steelmaking Pole of Asturias (Spain), 1939 1985Guillermo Antu a
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 503 - 532
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10098 Published Online on 1 December 2025

From New Left to Social Enterprise: A Conceptual History of the Industrial Common Ownership Movement, 1971 2001

Sean Irving
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 533 - 562
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10099 Published Online on 2 December 2025

Feedlot Imprimatur: Public-Private Cooperation in the Advent of Government Beef GradingDaniel T. Gresham
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 563 - 586
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10104 Published Online on 2 December 2025

Mary G. Roebling, Capitalist Feminism, and Marketing American Women s Economic Rights

Christy Ford Chapin
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 587 - 617
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10095 Published Online on 23 December 2025

The War Against Venereal Diseases: Engineering Protective Practices during World War II in Sweden

Anna Inez Bergman
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 618 - 644
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10111 Published Online on 13 January 2026

Corrigendum

The War Against Venereal Diseases: Engineering Protective Practices during World War II in Sweden CORRIGENDUM

Anna Inez Bergman
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 645 - 645
doi: 10.1017/eso.2026.10113 Published Online on 26 January 2026

Article

Professionalism and Presbyterianism: How Edinburgh s Financial Elite Sustained Itself in the 20th Century

Robert Dawson Scott
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 646 - 674
doi: 10.1017/eso.2026.10112 Published Online on 26 January 2026

Accounting for Partridge: Food and Value in the Eighteenth-Century Hudson s Bay Company

Michael Borsk
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 675 - 700
doi: 10.1017/eso.2026.10114 Published Online on 24 April 2026

Salt of the Earth: ABF Freight and Entrepreneurial Processes in American Trucking

Nathanael L. Mickelson
Enterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp 701 - 736
doi: 10.1017/eso.2026.10115 Published Online on 23 February 2026

Front Cover (OFC, IFC) and matter

ESO volume 27 issue 2 Cover and Front matterEnterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp f1 - f5
doi: 10.1017 /eso.2025.10086 Published Online on 5 May 2026

Back Cover (OBC, IBC) and matter

ESO volume 27 issue 2 Cover and Back matterEnterprise & Society, Volume 27 / Issue 2, June 2026, pp b1 - b3
doi: 10.1017/eso.2025.10087 Published Online on 5 May 2026

Free posts:

• The Guide to Historical Methods in Management, of course

• The Vibecoding Historian

• Is AI taking over Social Science Part 1 (Part 2 is mostly free as well)

• Rohin’s great talk about his Organization Science article

• Paula’s excellent post on research dissemination

• Preparing the literature review

• What is Social Entrepreneurship by Kerryn Krige

• Historical Research for Management Studies

• Marking in the Age of AI, Part 1

I have been meaning to write this post for some time. I’ve seen so many AI-related discussions (and tirades) in the last few weeks and months that I felt it was time to talk not just about the whole crisis narrative, but also about how you can use AI in ways to make your work better — or at least avoid using it badly.

Because I think this is missing.

Because I think it is drowned out by quite a bit of misinformation and misdirection.

Because we are increasingly operating in a two-track research environment in which quantitative scholars are engaging with the opportunities for AI-enhanced research practices, while many, including leading qualitative scholars, are focused on stigmatising AI use in a black-and-white manner that precludes any conversation about how and where it might be beneficial.

I’ll be honest, I have started to get quite frustrated with the nature and direction of the debate.

Discussing AI at my institution

What really brought this home to me was a recent meeting about running an AI research day at my home institution. Each department nominated one person, and I was nominated by our research lead — which is interesting, given that our department is mixed quant-qual, leaning towards quant. The reps from two wholly quant departments (it’s a business school) were commended for their cutting-edge involvement with AI. I’ll be honest, I am barely even vaguely aware of what they do — not a reflection of what they do, rather, that it is unlikely to be relevant to my research practice.

But it made me reflect that I cannot think of a single qualitative scholar that a research director would sing such praises about… perhaps Stine Grodal and Henri Schildt, but beyond that?

That’s not a coincidence. I reflected that I would be concerned if anyone were to single me out or one of my co-authors for our cutting-edge use of AI. Because that would feel one step away from suspecting us of research misconduct…

A while ago, I posted about the AI doomers and boomers, but since then, the debate has moved on, and not in a positive direction IMHO.

Most of this post will be free, but with some pointers and suggestions on how to best leverage AI in responsible and acceptable ways for research, especially qualitative aspects, for full subscribers only — because right now we are in the unproductive finger-pointing stage of technology adoption (I see a process model coming on), so frankly, get lost. You want to point fingers at me, you’ll have to pay me first.

The great peer review debate … and crisis

It was at the EGOS (European Group of Organization Studies) conference in Cagliari in 2023 that I attended a panel on the crisis of peer review. Nobody talked about AI at all at this panel — ChatGPT was still a glint in the undergraduate and postgraduate students’ eyes who hadn’t quite started to deliver surprisingly smooth prose that forced their academic assessors to actually engage their critical faculties while reading it to note how conceptually empty, and at times, outright confused, the underlying meaning of said prose was.

So, let’s recap:

Peer review before 2022/3 — crisis? Oh yes.

And yes, I definitely fall into the “AI has poured oil on the fire” quadrant that the Organization Science team has devised.

So Here's the Idea: The Organization Science Substack

More Versus Better, Part III

This is the third and final installment in a series of three essays from the Organization Science AI Task Force. Part I examined the rise in AI-generated submissions and Part II assessed the prevalence and content of AI-generated reviews. We now turn to the institutional incentives driving the trends we observed and to our thoughts on the peer review pr…

Read more

a month ago · 10 likes · Claudine Gartenberg, Sharique Hasan, Alex Murray, Lamar Pierce, and Organization Science

The great peer review crisis of 2026 has been pointedly developed in a Substack post by Scott Cunningham, based on economics journals (now behind a paywall). The Organization Science team, using an unreliable AI detector to measure their construct of academic AI slop (construct clarity, anyone? No? How odd…), comes to a similar conclusion: increased submissions of poor quality. Of course, they know these detectors are unreliable, so they only use scores high enough to argue that the text must be AI-generated, with little to no human editing.

So Here's the Idea: The Organization Science Substack

More Versus Better, Part I

This is the first in a series of three essays based on findings from the Organization Science AI Task Force. The full paper, “More versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review,” is available to download at the Organization Science website. Over the next two days, we will examine what is happening on the revi…

Read more

2 months ago · 43 likes · Lamar Pierce, Claudine Gartenberg, Alex Murray, and Sharique Hasan

Sensible on the face of it, but what does this measure? AI — I think not. Slop — for sure.

Why?

Because with a little setup, my AI tool of choice produces text that Pangram assesses as 100% human. (With medium confidence. No confidence intervals reported.)

What do AI detectors detect? And how to fool them

I like Pangram. Unlike other tools, it pulls back the curtain and shows how the sausage is made.

With other tools like Grammarly, I have run AI detection on fully generated text (anywhere between 20-70% AI identified) and then edited it substantially. A lot of the time, I might rewrite an entire paragraph, only for it still to show as AI-generated when it really wasn’t anymore. (Also, it identifies reference lists as AI-generated...)

So what are the tells? Probably everyone knows about the preponderance of “delve” and em dashes. Pangram allows you to upload text, and it identifies what elements are typically overused by AI:

• The by now well-known “it is not this, it is that” construction. Occasionally impactful, but Hollis Robbins writes on her Substack why this is quite rude towards a knowledgeable reader.

• Listing items in threes - now there’s a bit of an aha moment, given that all good things are supposed to come in threes. So if any listings are threes, make them twos or fours, and watch an AI detector switch from 100% AI to 100% human.

Why am I telling you this?

Because a halfway competent, reasonably curious human can game this with little effort. Indeed, you can use your auxiliary rent-a-brain to do it in a second pass over generated text as part of general or project-based instructions. What else are you paying a subscription fee for?

Just to emphasise here, the construct does not measure AI use (or overuse) or, indeed, wholly AI-generated submissions. Personally, I do not think that current LLMs can generate an Org Sci-level paper without significant intervention. Not least because LLMs can’t jump* — generating novel theoretical insights requires abduction, and LLMs are bad at that.

Then again, many humans are bad at generating novel theoretical insights (something reviewers frequently throw at me, and everyone else, I suspect, as it is the equivalent of the Monopoly “Go to Jail” card).

But Scott Cunningham’s point here is that model capabilities are constantly improving, and that the top of the distribution will move closer to human-generated articles, making it more difficult to distinguish between them.

So here’s my idea…

Why try to distinguish at all? Why not accept that good scholarship, AI-assisted, is still good scholarship, and bad scholarship, with or without AI, is just that? Because then we are back in the familiar territory of the peer-review crisis and of papers overloading the system. (And the thorny issue of inconsistent human judgment, academic politics, etc., which are very much not an AI thing.)

Just faster.

Which is irrelevant, as we have known this for years and have manifestly failed to do anything about it. So this might actually be a good thing (a la Kustov). At the very least, it is not a fundamental change — just one you can finally no longer patch up by upping the ante on free academic labour.

Don’t get me wrong — I recently reviewed a piece in a top journal and was pretty convinced it was mostly AI. There was potentially one hallucinated reference in there, but I felt it could be defended (there seemed to be some formatting issues), and it would not have caused me to point fingers. Rather, it was the fundamental underdevelopment of ideas and the conceptual emptiness of a competently written piece.

I did not upload the piece to an AI detector, which would have been inappropriate.

I did not upload the piece to my AI tool to produce a review, which would have been inappropriate.

And neither should anyone else. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

(Also, AI tools are notoriously too nice to crappy academic articles.)

What about “review by AI”

Apparently, students generating their assignments with AI are unwilling to be assessed by AI. Can’t say I am surprised. Because both decisions are unwise.

Let me tell you an anecdote.

Some years ago, say, in 2023, we submitted a paper to a major management journal for a special issue. We received two very short reviews, along with a non-existent editorial letter, from an editor with impressive shared editorial and research experience. I’ve had significantly better reviews and letters from 2* journals than from this 4.

I discussed it with my co-author, and since I was in faculty training on the new AI tools (2023, remember), I decided to try one of these tools and asked it to review our paper (after checking with my co-author). The review was way better: more substantive and more detailed. That was my first time using Claude, and I’ve stuck with it ever since.

These days, the tools are better and my instructions more precise. I don’t take all the points at face value; they prompt further thought and refinement. Not accepting an AI review may be a significant mistake. Not because it is always right, but because it can improve your research and your thinking.

As I am working on papers for submission, I have uploaded a more recent version to Claude and asked for an academic review for the specific target journal. What I got back was well-reasoned, detailed, and really pushed me to address some of the weaknesses of the piece and take strategic decisions on risky bits. My next step is to trial Refine.ink, as I've heard positive things about it. That’s mostly from quants, though. Trying out the platform, I thought it looked promising. By all means, check it out:

Refine.ink

Where are we? We should not judge scholarship by its AI content. We should not judge the quality of a review based on whether it is AI-generated. If you are good at using AI, you can use it in helpful ways. Constantly stigmatising AI use means fewer of us dare to try it, and those who know how to use it well and responsibly will not share how to do so.

This is not developmental — these are gatekeeping dynamics.

Because judgment and evaluation are human, and we should not outsource it to a simple heuristic: neither to have an AI-system replace human judgment, nor reduce human judgment to a denial of anything AI.

So what about AI and peer review?

I know that the above leaves a lot unanswered:

• What to do if you suspect your reviewer used AI to review your article?

• Should you use AI to help with your reviews?

I don’t promise all the answers, but I have a few suggestions after the paywall ;-)

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New book out on Security and Risk in economic and business history; Stephanie had opinions on the AOM relocation to Vienna in the FT; and this week, the University of Geneva hosts a fascinating workshop on the political economy of global and imperial activities beyond the well-known thinkers. With a bit more notice, we have an announcement of a forthcoming Hagley workshop, and we close with a new Hagley History Hangout on “Postindustrial Heritagization” with international cases. Enjoy!

Contents

1. New book on Security and Risk by Huber, Kleinöder & Kleinschmidt

2. FT covers AOM move to Europe, and quotes Stephanie (!)

3. Geneva business history workshop, Switzerland

4. Advertising and Marketing workshop at Hagley Museum and Library, Delaware, US

5. History Hangout: Conversation with Julia Silva de Medeiros

1. Security and Risk:

Challenges for Economy and Business in the Global 20th Century Edited by Marie Huber, Nina Kleinöder, and Christian Kleinschmidt (Nomos, 2026, open access)

This volume addresses the relationship between security and risk in economic and business history, with a distinctive analytical move: rather than foregrounding entrepreneurial risk-taking as the default driver of economic action, it centres security-seeking — the preventive measures, cautious corporate strategies, public demands for protection, and the deliberate avoidance of actions deemed too risky.

The book concludes a 12-year interdisciplinary research project within the Collaborative Research Center “Dynamics of Security: Forms of Securitization in Historical Perspective” at Philipps-Universität Marburg, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Drawing on the CRC’s analytical framework of situations (what gets identified as a security problem), heuristics (how it is interpreted), and repertoires (what strategies are developed in response), the volume tests whether constructivist approaches from critical security studies can be productively applied to non-state actors — particularly corporations and business associations.

The result is an interdisciplinary collection spanning business history (Kleinöder, Marx), economic history (Kleinschmidt, Huber), financial sociology (Salzer, Langenohl), Eastern European history (Sahling), and global history (Afoumba, Schwertner). Some contributions work closely with the CRC’s securitisation terminology; others foreground risk management in the Knightian tradition. Together, they demonstrate that securitisation processes in the economic sphere almost always involve both state and business actors, and that the focus on security reveals dimensions of corporate decision-making — the risks not taken, the stability measures pursued — that risk-centred approaches alone tend to miss.

Link to interview with editors.

TOC is after video

Security and Risk: Challenges for Economy and Business in the Global 20th Century Edited by Marie Huber, Nina Kleinöder & Christian Kleinschmidt Nomos, Baden-Baden 2026 | Series: Economic and Social History of Modern Europe, Vol. 11

Preface (pp. 1–6)

Security and Risk: The Case of Foreign Trade Securitisation (pp. 7–26) Marie Huber, Nina Kleinöder & Christian Kleinschmidt

Balancing Waters, Negotiating Risks: Economic Growth, Environmental Protection and Water Governance in Industrial Germany (pp. 27–50) Anna Corsten

Security and Risk in Colonial Contexts: The Enterprise–Security Nexus in the Construction of the Swakopmund Jetty, c. 1911–1920 (pp. 51–88) Nina Kleinöder

Sovereign Numbers: The Chinese Tariff and Economic Expertise in the 1910s and 1920s (pp. 89–112) Tim Salzer

The Securitisation of Transactions after Financial Crashes: The Case of Black Thursday, 1929 (pp. 113–132) Andreas Langenohl

Energy Security and Securitisation in the Federal Republic of Germany: Between Reconstruction and the Oil Crisis (1945–1973) (pp. 133–166) Christian Kleinschmidt

Europe as a Lifeline: The Rubber Industry in Times of Insecurity after the Second World War (pp. 167–194) Tonio Schwertner

Navigating Transition: The Contractualisation of British Economic Relations to Cameroon amid Independence (pp. 195–216) Dolly Afoumba

Securitising Development: The “AG Entwicklungsländer” of the BDI 1960–1975 and how German Business Lobbying Transformed Investment Risks into Economic Security Policy (pp. 217–250) Marie Huber

The Risk of Foreign Direct Investment: Multinationals of the West German Chemical Industry in the 1970s and 1980s (pp. 251–284) Christian Marx

Cheap Oil in Old Pipelines: Tracing German–Russian Oil Connections from the Cold War Division to Energy Sanctions (pp. 285–318) Cornelia Sahling

Author Information (pp. 319–321)

More info: https://www.nomos-shop.de/en/p/security-and-risk-gr-978-3-7560-3577-9

Download free copy

2. Business school academics cancel US conference and switch to Europe

And I get quoted at quite some length, too!

Prof Stephanie Decker at Birmingham Business School told the FT that she would not attend this year and the cancellation of Seattle was “a bit of a bombshell”. She said: “It feels sometimes quite personally painful seeing what’s going on [in the US] right now. Canadian colleagues have said they are absolutely not going to the US for as long as there is a very aggressive posture towards Canada. There’s a sense of almost a patriotic duty not to go. With Europeans, maybe some people are worried, and there have been some immigration issues.”

3. Political economy beyond political economists WORKSHOP May 21-22, 2026

Political economy beyond political economists: understanding political economy in action (1700-1840)

Between the end of the XVIIth century and the middle of the XIXth century, mounting interimperial rivalries and major economic changes (i.e., the industrial revolution) intertwined with a growing formalization of scientific knowledge and, more specifically, the emergence of political economy.

In 1776, Adam Smith famously characterised political economy as “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” that aims “to enrich both the people and the sovereign”. However, the role of economists and the subject of their study were still very much undefined at the time. On the one hand, economics as a distinct academic discipline had yet to emerge, and the boundaries with other fields of knowledge such as moral philosophy, natural sciences, or political theology were unclear. On the other hand, discussions of provocative ideas about the origins of wealth, the regulation of markets and freedom of trade were not restricted to closed intellectual circles.

Even though most of early economic debate took place beyond elite intellectual and political spheres, this significant yet elusive portion of economic thinking has largely escaped the attention of conventional histories of political economy. It is only in recent years that a growing stream of research has examined the emergence of economic discourse beyond the scope of prominent figures who came to define the trajectories of modern economic debates.

Link to full programme and further information.

4. Networks of Creative Persuasion in Advertising and Marketing

A Conference at the Hagley Library, Wilmington Delaware

Friday, November 6, 2026

This conference will explore the networks of creative and intellectual labor in American advertising and marketing, broadly defined, from the colonial period through the twentieth century. We seek papers that identify and explain the nodes of production and intellectual labor that crafted persuasive communication in these fields. The conference aims to understand the variety of creators and producers who contributed to persuasion in American commerce and their connections to advertising agencies. We ask: In what ways did these hidden networks of persuasion shape American business and culture?

While much scholarship focuses on advertisements as artifacts, the people who contributed the intellectual and creative labor to produce such artifacts have often remained invisible. Many of these practitioners circulated among the overlapping fields of advertising, marketing, merchandising, promotion, and public relations even while building careers in creative fields such as art, literature, film, or music. Some also shifted their professional activities from these fields to marketing and advertising firms – and vice versa.

We are particularly interested in papers that explore the interactions between various nodes in the networks of advertising production such as:

• How did these networks of persuasion function and how did they overlap?

• What were the geographical and social spaces of creative production that brought creators together (e.g. particular cities, neighborhoods, buildings, cafes, and the like)?

• In what ways did advertising and promotional work help subsidize creative careers?

• What were the interactions of such individuals with agency professionals and their clients?

• How did people in these networks interact with each other, and / or circulate in related fields?

• In what ways did these networks shape the evolution of advertising, marketing, and promotion in American business and culture?

Alternatively, papers might consider the intellectual and creative labor contributed by specific individuals or professions, including but not limited to:

• Printers, lithographers, typesetters, and related technicians

• Playwrights, professional authors, journalists, and literary professionals (e.g., magazine editors)

• Musicians, composers

• Photographers, illustrators, painters, graphic designers, filmmakers, and other artists

• Interior designers, window-display creators, industrial designers, set designers, fashion designers, and merchandisers

• Market researchers, management theorists, psychologists, and sociologists

• Business leaders, entrepreneurs, inventors

• Key innovators or innovations that laid the groundwork for aesthetic or strategic changes in advertising practices

• How outside creative and intellectual labor was valued (whether underpaid or overpaid) in advertising and marketing

Please submit proposals of no more than 500 words and a one-page C.V. to Carol Lockman at clockman@Hagley.org by June 1, 2026. Conference presenters will be asked to submit complete versions of their conference papers by Sept 26, 2026. The conference is planned as an in-person event but will adopt a virtual format if necessary. Presenters will receive lodging in the conference hotel and compensation for their travel costs. The program committee includes Jennifer Black, Cynthia Meyers, Greg Hargreaves, and Roger Horowitz.

5. Postindustrial Heritagization: Serra do Navio, Brazil and Bethlehem, PA

History Hangout: Conversation with Julia Silva de Medeiros

What happens when industrial towns lose their defining industries? How do the remaining communities and infrastructures find meaning and a future among the postindustrial remains? The key often lies in heritagization, the process by which certain aspects of the past are identified, preserved, and presented as heritage.

In her dissertation research, Julia Silva de Medeiros, associate researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, compares the postindustrial heritagization processes in Serra do Navio, Brazil and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, both of which once had major metallurgical industries, mining manganese and making steel respectively. Silva de Medeiros shows that the values prevailing among decision makers get embedded in the heritage passed down to future generations.

In support of her work, Silva de Medeiros received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library.

The audio-only version of this program is available on our podcast.

After last week’s free post, I thought I would create a bit of a list and resource of which Friday posts are now available for free.

Catch-up service:

• The Guide to Historical Methods in Management, of course

• The Vibecoding Historian

• Is AI taking over Social Science Part 1 (Part 2 is mostly free as well)

• Rohin’s great talk about his Organization Science article

• Paula’s excellent post on research dissemination, also mentioned below.

There’s more, but I am running out of time and will provide a full list soon.

I teach strategy, so I have taught the value chain and related frameworks to students for years. When I was still an early-career scholar, I found myself in a position that many doctoral students might recognise: so many things seemed possible, and it was genuinely difficult to know what to do first or how much time to give to any of it.

At some point, I decided to try one of the strategy models I teach and apply it to my activities and career. So I asked myself: What does a value chain look like for an individual?

It turned out to be quite a fun exercise (yes, really). Not because the result was perfect, but because it forced me to look at the pieces, think about how they fit together, and be honest about the trade-offs. I have a tendency to say yes to everything, and it helped me see why that was not working.

This is what I talked about at the BAM Doctoral Fridays session last week. One of these things I like to say yes to. And, actually, rarely regret.

The value chain of a researcher

Porter’s value chain is a tool for understanding how an organisation creates value: what comes in, what gets processed, what gets delivered to market, and what support functions underpin it all. It was designed for firms. Turns out it works okay for academic careers, which is either reassuring or alarming, depending on your disposition.

My version looks roughly like this: On the research side — inbound resources (reading, data, ideas, networks), operations (writing articles, preparing grant applications), and delivery (submitting, navigating peer review, publication). Teaching sits alongside this as a parallel track: preparation, delivery, assessment. And then the key element at the end, which is frequently overlooked: visibility. Which is something that most of us ignore – but if you spent a lot of time and effort on creating the best work possible, you want it to be visible in your community, sure?

Self-promotion always seemed to be more warmly embraced by our American colleagues (sorry guys), at least that was my impression during the PhD, so many years ago. These days, social media has changed the playing field. Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez and I are planning a small, affordable e-Book that brings together blogs and broader practice in dissemination as a guide. And in the meantime, LinkedIn has emerged as the academic marketplace of ideas that some say Twitter once was (I was not so involved in social media at the time).

Popular by Design

LinkedIn Is Doing What Bluesky Was Supposed to Do

For a brief moment about a year ago, it really did look like Bluesky might work. Researchers and left-of-center intellectuals were flooding in, swapping starter packs, reassembling what felt like a nostalgic reunion of old Twitter. Then everyone arrived, and the center could not hold. It turns out that people can disagree even when they are all on the l…

Read more

a month ago · 79 likes · 23 comments · Alexander Kustov

But back to the value chain exercise. What are the equivalent support functions for an academic career? Procurement means finding opportunities, securing funding and securing protected time within your institution. Continuous development means investing in your knowledge of literature, identifying training opportunities and expanding your skills. Building your infrastructure: reference management, databases, AI tools, whatever your digital setup looks like – and if you need help with that, check out the “Tech Stack” section on this blog.

Doing this exercise was a useful audit that made me feel more confident about balancing the different demands and opportunities in an academic career. Yours might look different; that’s kind of the point with these diagnostic business models. I immediately noticed that I was putting almost no energy into visibility — the part where people actually discover your work. Conferences, LinkedIn, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, a blog. As you can see, I have now taken care of these, and I even blogged about your essential and optional to-dos. Also worthwhile drawing on Anne-Wil Harzing’s resources; her blog and YouTube channel are worth checking out if this is not something you have already sorted out.

The other thing the exercise clarifies is trade-offs. A primarily research-focused academic will have a very different value chain from a teacher-scholar. But ultimately, all of us have kind of portfolio careers, which means facing a wide range of choices that need to be balanced.

The ikigai of scholarly publishing

There is a Japanese concept, ikigai — roughly “life value” or “a sense of purpose.” In its popular form, it describes the overlap of four things: what you love, what the world needs, what you are good at, and what you can be paid for. You have probably seen the diagram. It’s cute, and a good way to dig a little deeper into what motivates you. And there is no part of an academic career where you need to be more motivated than scholarly publishing. Sadly.

For scholarly publishing, I think the four circles should be: what you love to write about, what the world needs to read, what gets recognised by your peers, and what gets published in the journals that count in your field.

The overlaps are perhaps more interesting:

• Editors of prestigious journals will tell you they publish what the world needs. Read a few issues of any of them and form your own view on that.

• What you love to write and what your peers recognise sometimes coincide – but often not, and the gap can feel like a personal failing when it is actually a structural feature of the field.

• The full four-way overlap – the thing you love, that matters, that is recognised, and that high-status journals will publish – does exist. It just tends to belong to a fairly small number of people at the top of the distribution.

Most of the time, you are navigating trade-offs between these four things. Knowing where you are willing to make these trade-offs should be a central part of your research strategy. And if a research career does not actually appeal once you think it through clearly, that is important information too. Maybe teaching, or more impact-oriented work with practitioners, or indeed management, is what you end up finding more appealing. That is fine. Strategy is mostly about what you are NOT going to do.

After the paywall, we look at practical ways to manage your time (which is not actually possible, more on that later), some systems that I found to work well, and some resources that help you figure out what might work for you.

Also, the usual collated list of reading suggestions from media and blogosphere, and a completely gratuitous picture of a lovely Venetian craft shop (that you should totally visit if you are there) if you scroll all the way to the bottom :-)

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After a really quiet update last week, it has been getting pretty lively again in the inbox: AOM will replace US locations with central European ones (Vienna and Frankfurt) after the Philadelphia conference, Hagley announces a grant for Oral History and the Archival Center at Bowling Green State University offers funding for visits, Jyväskylä University in Finland runs another HIMOS event, and accounting historians have several events and calls for papers coming up. Enjoy!

Contents

1. The AOM announcement

2. Hagley Library Oral History Grant, US

3. 10. HIMOS event at Jyväskylä University, Finland

4. Archival Centre in Bowling Green State University, US

5. Update from Accounting History about forthcoming events

1. AOM is leaving the US

AOM members received an email that set out a radical move away from US locations:

… the 2027 Annual Meeting will take place in Vienna, Austria from 30 July to 3 August 2027, relocating from Seattle, Washington, USA. Future meetings are planned for Toronto in 2028, Frankfurt in 2029, and London in 2030, following Philadelphia in 2026, with future locations expanding to reflect AOM’s commitment to global access.

We recognize that members may face a range of challenges in how and where they are able to connect and engage, and we remain focused on providing multiple pathways for participation across regions and formats. This includes support for those planning to participate in the Annual Meeting, as well as opportunities to engage through year-round activities organized by AOM journals, Divisions and Interest Groups, and Community Accelerator Program partners around the world. A range of resources is also available to support participation, with additional information provided below.

From what I hear, it has become increasingly problematic for many members to gain visas to enter the US.

2. Oral history grant

The Oral History Office of the Hagley Library invites applications for oral history project support. These grants of up to $5,000 are awarded twice annually. Project grant funds may be used to reimburse costs associated with travel to interviewees. Funds may also be for equipment purchases but not stipends. Reimbursement of costs will take place promptly after submission of the interview sound file, metadata, release forms, and receipts.

Interviews must be conducted in English and in accordance with the standards of the Oral History Association and the Hagley Library’s own technical requirements (available upon request). Oral history projects must fit within Hagley’s collecting scope; broadly the interconnected histories of American business, technology, and society.

Grant recipients must use Hagley’s release form and ensure that any restrictions will permit public access to the interviews within a reasonable timeframe, specific terms to be negotiated. In consultation with the interviewer, Hagley will transcribe interviews and make the transcribed interviews available to the interviewer and as part of our public archive.

To apply please visit: https://www.hagley.org/research/grants-fellowships/oral-history-project-grant .

Deadline: June 1

3. 10th HIMOS event

the 10^th HiMOS seminar event is approaching and the officialregistration for the event is open (deadline: May 22!): https://forms.gle/BEYwsrjnZsMHoRZ97

While some of you have already expressed your interest to participate with the CfP form (circulated earlier), we also need your confirmation to organize all the logistics related to the venue, catering, and dinner reservations, and thus kindly ask everyone to fill this registration form as well. Thank you!

We are also pleased to announce our seminar program and the full lineup for our upcoming event, featuring Marcelo Bucheli (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) as our keynote speaker. We will have two days of HiMOS events in Jyväskylä, starting off with the early-version paper presentations on Mon. June 8^th (from 11:30 to 16:15 + dinner at 18:00) and continuing with the keynote and full paper presentations on Tue. June 9th (from 09:30 to 16:00). We look forward to welcoming a diverse group of history-minded business scholars from across the world.

In tradition of prior HiMOS workshops, we aim to learn more about historical methods and how to publish such work in top management journals. We kindly ask you to carefully read the instructions attached to the program, as they include important details about the workshop format and logistics. We will also circulate all the papers related to presentations before the event and ask everyone to read the papers in advance. To access the papers, you may use the following Dropbox link (papers available by May 28): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/wlho57i4ys55q1dtbqud9/ABZdBEPucVljJgqEVPqsrdQ?rlkey=050wr3otler8ghax296jqw261&dl=0

For any questions or inquiries, you can reach us via e-mail, phone (Zeerim +358 50 462 4944 ; Nooa +358 50 346 48 79 and Christian +358 40 648 41 86).

We look forward to seeing you in Jyväskylä!

All the best,

The organizers (Zeerim, Nooa & Christian)

4. Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University

As Head of the Center for Archival Collections (CAC) at Bowling Green State University, I hope that you might be willing to share information about our newly established Access to the Archives Travel Grant with your colleagues and fellow members of the Business History Conference. Our grant program offers up to 3 three competitive Research Travel Grants to support researchers who plan to spend at least five full working days using collections held by the CAC. The award is intended to promote and support original scholarly or creative work and to defray the costs of travel to and residence in Bowling Green, not to exceed $1,500 per award. Full details about the grant program, information on applications, and more can be found on our website. Applications are due May 31, 2026. Questions and applications should be emailed to Michelle Sweetser.

5. Accounting History Updates: CfPs and Events

A number of events and due dates are also on the horizon to which we would like to bring your attention:

• The 25th Accounting History Symposium on Saturday, 4 July 2026, 9.00 am -1.00 pm at the Pullman Albert Park Hotel, Melbourne, Australia (see: Accounting History Special Interest Group - Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand for the call for Research Proposals)

• The 13th AHIC will be hosted by the University of Wollongong, Australia from 8-11 July 2026 with the theme - “Accounting through the ages: Lessons for modern challenges”. Conference registration is now open, see: The 13th Accounting History International Conference - The 13th Accounting History International Conference

• Accounting and Totalitarianism in an Historical Perspective submissions are due on the Journal site by 31 July 2026 and

• Accounting History - Women and Accounting’s Past submissions are due on the Journal site by 28 September 2026.

This Friday’s post is free, and also a bit of a resource guide for all things History in Organizations. If you are receiving this via email, you will find that some email clients will truncate it. Just click the link to read it on the website.

Free posts:

• The Vibecoding Historian

• Is AI taking over Social Science Part 1 (Part 2 is mostly free as well)

• Rohin’s great talk about his Organization Science article

• Paula’s excellent post on research dissemination

• Preparing the literature review

• What is Social Entrepreneurship by Kerryn Krige

• Historical Research for Management Studies

• Marking in the Age of AI, Part 1

• Publishing in Business History

Catch-up service:

• Building a team for a research grant

• Writing for Publication: What nobody tells you — Part 2

• Writing for Publication: What nobody tells you — Part 1

Management and organisation studies have developed a significant methodological literature over the past two decades on the use of historical sources and approaches. Yet for many researchers trained in social science traditions, the practical question of how to actually work with history remains underspecified. What does it mean to do archival research? How does oral history differ from qualitative interviewing? When does historical analysis become processual, and why does that matter? How are digitised and born-digital sources changing practice?

This post offers a practical orientation to the main approaches. It is aimed primarily at management and organisation scholars who are new to historical methods, or who need to articulate their methodological positioning clearly for a journal submission or a PhD thesis methods chapter. It draws on the growing body of methodological writing in this field, including the Handbook of Historical Methods for Management (Decker, Foster & Giovannoni, 2023), a key reference work for researchers in this area.

Why historical methods deserve their own treatment

History has always been present at the margins of organisation studies, but for several decades after the 1960s, the dominance of variable-based, comparative research designs pushed longitudinal, contextually rich historical work to the periphery. The renewed interest in historical approaches since the 1990s and early 2000s is well documented. Kipping & Üsdiken (2014) provide a systematic account of how history has returned to management research, distinguishing between work that uses history as evidence to develop theory (”history to theory”) and work in which history is constitutive of the theoretical argument itself (”history in theory”). Others have built on their terminology to outline pathways to integrating historical research in other subfields (Argyres et al., 2020).

What the “historic turn” literature established (Clark & Rowlinson, 2004), and what is sometimes lost in subsequent use, is that historical methods are not simply qualitative methods applied to old data. They involve a specific epistemological orientation toward the reconstruction of the past through primary sources, including attention to the conditions under which those sources were created, what they do and do not record, and what silences they contain. As Rowlinson, Hassard & Decker (2014) argued in their Academy of Management Review piece on research strategies for organisational history, this requires reflexivity about the epistemological problem of representing the past – not treating history as a repository of ready-made data, but as a construction made from surviving traces.

Archival research

Archival research is the core method of historical work on organisations. Corporate and organisational archives contain the documentary residue of decision-making: board minutes, internal correspondence, financial records, personnel files, marketing materials, product development records, and legal documents. Business historians also work with public archives (national and regional government records, regulatory filings and court records) and collections held by libraries and specialist repositories (Decker, 2023).

The practical entry point is usually the finding aid: a structured description of what an archive holds, how it is organised, and what access conditions apply. Not all archives have complete or accurate finding aids, and part of archival skill is learning to search productively in collections that are partially described or misfiled.

The deeper methodological issue is reflexivity about what archives do and do not contain. Archives are not neutral. Records were created for specific purposes, often organisational or legal ones, and their survival was shaped by decisions about what to keep and what to discard, sometimes decades or centuries later. My “Silence of the Archives” argument, which I revisited in a 2025 Management & Organizational History essay, holds that what is absent from the documentary record is as methodologically significant as what is present, and that researchers need to develop explicit strategies for handling archival gaps. This matters more acutely in some contexts than others: postcolonial archives, for instance, are shaped by imperial power dynamics that systematically excluded certain voices and perspectives from documentation. Decker, Nix & Shen (2025) address this directly, arguing for triangulation strategies — using multiple source types to cross-validate and to interrogate the biases built into any single archive.

Practical guidance on conducting archival research in management is available in my SAGE Methods Case (2023) and in Chapter 6 of the Handbook (Barros, 2023), which covers how to approach archives, build a data corpus from records, and maintain reflexivity throughout the research process.

Oral history and retrospective accounts

Oral history occupies a distinct methodological space that is often incorrectly conflated with qualitative interviewing. The difference is purpose: qualitative interviews in organisation studies typically gather accounts of present experience or attitude; oral history is concerned with reconstructing the past through memory, and the reliability and validity questions it raises are consequently different (Decker et al., 2021).

The standard challenges with oral history evidence are retrospective sense-making (the way people impose a coherent narrative on events that were more chaotic at the time), telescoping (compression or expansion of time sequences in memory), and the suppression of unflattering material. None of these makes oral history unreliable as a source; they make it a particular kind of source that needs to be read critically and, where possible, triangulated with documentary evidence. And source critique demands this of most historical materials (Howell & Prevenier, 2001; Dobson & Zieman, 2009; Kipping et al., 2014)

Oral history is most valuable where the documentary record is incomplete or silent: recovering the accounts of actors whose perspectives were not captured in formal records, reconstructing informal decision-making processes that left no written trace, and accessing knowledge of events within living memory. Giacomin (2023) provides a methodological discussion of oral history for historical research in the Handbook of Historical Methods for Management.

Decker, Hassard & Rowlinson (2021) draw a further distinction, in their Human Relations paper on historiographical reflexivity, between historical organisation studies (research into the past primarily through archival sources) and retrospective organisational history (reconstruction of the past through retrospective accounts). Both are legitimate approaches, but they carry different epistemological commitments and should not be treated as equivalent.

Process approaches and longitudinal analysis

Process history traces how organisations, industries, technologies, or practices change over time. The concern is with sequences, mechanisms and their outcomes. This is related to, but distinct from, process organisation studies (particularly associated with the work of Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas): historical process work focuses on reconstructing past events, drawing on primary sources, rather than on theory-building about processual dynamics from fieldwork.

Two considerations are central. First, periodisation: historians divide time into meaningful units based on the evidence – shifts in competitive conditions, regulatory changes, leadership transitions, exogenous shocks. The choice of periodisation is itself an interpretive act and should be made explicit and justified rather than treated as natural or given. Second, scale: process history can operate at the level of the single organisation, across multiple organisations within an industry or sector, or at the systemic level (Decker, 2022). The level of analysis shapes which sources are appropriate, and which claims the evidence can support.

Rowlinson, Hassard & Decker (2014) distinguish four research strategies for organisational history that map onto different combinations of epistemological stance and evidence type: corporate history, analytically structured history, serial history, and ethnographic history (reading sources “against the grain”). The distinction between these strategies is practically useful when justifying methodological choices in a journal submission, because it clarifies what kind of claims the historical work is designed to make.

Digital and computational methods

Historical research on organisations is changing rapidly as digitised archival collections expand and as computational tools for working with large document sets become more accessible.

Digitised sources. A growing share of the sources relevant to business and organisational history is now available online, either as digitised versions of analogue materials (newspapers, company filings, government documents) or as born-digital records. Nix & Decker (2023) develop a framework for distinguishing among the following: digitised analogue sources, “reborn-digital” sources (originally digital, exported to analogue and then re-digitised), and born-digital sources. Each type has different characteristics relevant to authentication, completeness, and the nature of the evidence it provides. Major repositories with relevant digitised collections include the British Newspaper Archive, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, Chronicling America (US), and the holdings of national archives.

Born-digital archives. Email archives are among the most significant born-digital sources for research into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Decker, Kirsch, Kuppili Venkata & Nix (2022) have worked extensively on the methodological and computational challenges of born-digital email archives, including the EMCODIST project (Kuppili Venkata et al., 2021) and their work on the Dot-Com Email Archive. The challenge lies both in the scale and the contextual poverty of large email datasets: individual messages are frequently decontextualised, and finding meaningful patterns requires combining computational search with contextual historical knowledge.

AI and transcription. AI-assisted transcription of handwritten historical documents is now a realistic option for researchers working with large volumes of manuscript material. Transkribus (transkribus.eu) is the most established platform in this space, offering handwritten text recognition models trained on historical scripts – but Google’s Gemini is increasingly giving it a run for the money. The quality varies by script type and language, and post-correction is usually necessary, but the time savings on large collections can be substantial. OHN’s Tech Stack section has covered AI tools for historical research in more depth.

Corpus and text analysis. Computational methods for text analysis — topic modelling, named entity recognition and word embeddings – are increasingly applied to historical document collections. The methodological caution worth stating clearly is that these methods identify patterns in text; they do not produce historical interpretation. The patterns still need to be interpreted with historical context in mind – statistical regularity does not equate to historical significance. Used as a heuristic and combined with close reading of key documents, they can be genuinely useful (Hannigan et al., 2019; Goldenstein et al., 2026).

Positioning historical methods in a journal submission

For researchers navigating peer review, three recurring challenges arise when submitting historically grounded work to management journals.

First, the reliability question. Reviewers trained in quantitative or survey-based traditions sometimes ask about validity and trustworthiness in ways that are poorly matched to historical evidence (Gill et al., 2018). There are two avenues here to respond:

1) Not forcing historical data into a reliability framework that was designed for contemporary, researcher-recorded qualitative data, but to articulate the historiographical standards that apply: source triangulation across multiple independent archives, critical engagement with provenance and authorship of documents, and transparency about the limits of the surviving record. Vinokurova (2025) provides a great example of how to do this in the Strategic Management Journal.

2) Adapting historical approaches to the requirements of data transparency and data structures. This works better with some projects than others. Borpujari (2025) gives a masterclass on how to do this in Organization Science.

You can also watch the recordings of seminars by both Natalya Vinokurova and Rohin Borpujari here on the blog in the OHN Reading Club, complete with discussions of their articles.

Second, the theory contribution question. The “historic turn” debate concerned whether historical work should be judged primarily for its historical contribution or for its contribution to management theory. Decker, Hassard & Rowlinson (2021) argue for “historiographical reflexivity” as a concept that goes beyond the simple binary: the question is not history vs theory, but which epistemological commitments the researcher makes and whether they are consistent with the methods used.

Third, the venue question. Journals that are genuinely receptive to historical methods, rather than treating them as a peripheral novelty, include Business History, Management & Organizational History, Enterprise & Society, Business History Review, and Journal of Management History. Historically cognizant work has also appeared in Organization Studies, Human Relations, Academy of Management Review, and Journal of International Business Studies, among others, but the methodological bar is higher, in that the historical contribution needs to be legible to a social science audience that may not share historiographical assumptions.

The Career Pivot section has posts specifically on publishing strategy for historical researchers in management.

References

Argyres, N. S., De Massis, A., Foss, N. J., Frattini, F., Jones, G., & Silverman, B. S. (2020). History-informed strategy research: The promise of history and historical research methods in advancing strategy scholarship. Strategic Management Journal, 41(3), 343–368. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3118

Barros, A. (2023). Researching with records in management and organisation studies: archives, data corpus, and reflexivity. In S. Decker, W.M. Foster, & E. Giovannoni (Eds.), Handbook of Historical Methods for Management. Edward Elgar. https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781800883741/book-part-9781800883741-13.xml

Borpujari, R. (2025). Adaptive Secrecy in the Making of the Atomic Bomb: Toward a Process View of Secretive Innovation. Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17687

Clark, P., & Rowlinson, M. (2004). The treatment of history in organisation studies: Towards an ‘Historic turn’? Business History, 46(3), 331–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/0007679042000219175

Decker, S. (2022). Introducing the eventful temporality of historical research into international business. Journal of World Business, 57(6), 101380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2022.101380

Decker, S. (2023, April). Archival historical research in management. SAGE Research Methods Cases. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529667714

Decker, S. (2025). Silence of the archives redux. Management & Organizational History, advance online, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2025.2595970

Decker, S., Foster, W.M., & Giovannoni, E. (Eds.). (2023). Handbook of Historical Methods for Management. Edward Elgar.

Decker, S., Giovannoni, E., & Plakoyiannaki, E. (2025). A microhistory of architecture historical imagination and the Bauhaus. Management & Organizational History, 20(4), 453–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2024.2423095

Decker, S., Hassard, J., & Rowlinson, M. (2021). Rethinking history and memory in organization studies: The case for historiographical reflexivity. Human Relations, 74(8), 1123–1155. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726720927443

Decker, S., Kirsch, D. A., Kuppili Venkata, S., & Nix, A. (2022). Finding light in dark archives: Using AI to connect context and content in email. AI & SOCIETY, 37(3), 859–872. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01369-9

Decker, S., Nix, A., & Shen, G. (2025). Minding the gaps: Triangulation strategies for colonial and postcolonial archives. Business History, advance online, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2598410

Dobson, M., & Ziemann, B. (2009). Reading Primary Sources: The interpretation of texts from nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. Routledge.

Giacomin, V. (2023). Perspectives on oral history for historical research. In S. Decker, W.M. Foster, & E. Giovannoni (Eds.), Handbook of Historical Methods for Management. Edward Elgar.

Gill, M. J., Gill, D. J., & Roulet, T. J. (2018). Constructing Trustworthy Historical Narratives: Criteria, Principles and Techniques. British Journal of Management, 29(1), 191–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12262

Goldenstein, J., Jancsary, D., Grodal, S., Forgues, B., & Jennings, P. D. (Dev). (2026). Studying Culture and Meaning Through Interpretative Computational Methods: From theory to method and back. Organization Studies, 47(1), 7–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406251410383

Hannigan, T. R., Haan, R. F. J., Vakili, K., Tchalian, H., Glaser, V. L., Wang, M. S., Kaplan, S., & Jennings, P. D. (2019). Topic modeling in management research: Rendering new theory from textual data. Academy of Management Annals, 13(2), 586–632. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2017.0099

Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press.

Kipping, M., Wadhwani, R. D., & Bucheli, M. (2014). Analyzing and Interpreting Historical Sources: A Basic Methodology. In M. Bucheli & R. D. Wadhwani (Eds), Organizations in Time (pp. 305–329). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646890.003.0013

Kipping, M., & Üsdiken, B. (2014). History in organization and management theory: More than meets the eye. Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 535–588. https://doi.org/10.1080/19416520.2014.911579

Kuppili Venkata, S., Decker, S., Kirsch, D.A., & Nix, A. (2021). EMCODIST: A context-based search tool for email archives. Conference paper.

Nix, A., & Decker, S. (2023). Using digital sources: the future of business history? Business History, 65(6), 1048–1071. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1909572

Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., & Decker, S. (2014). Research strategies for organizational history: A dialogue between historical theory and organization theory. Academy of Management Review, 39(3), 250–274. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2012.0203

Tennent, K., & Gillet, A. (2023). How to research in an archive. In S. Decker, W. Foster, & E. Giovannoni (Eds), Handbook of Historical Methods in Management. Edward Elgar.

Vinokurova, N. (2025). Fitting innovations into existing categories: Evidence from mortgage‐backed securities. Strategic Management Journal, 46(10), 2573–2604. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3732

Editor’s note: This post is part of History in Organizations’s commitment to making methodological resources available to the research community. If you found it useful, consider subscribing to paid content, including in-depth career development guides and full podcast access.

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Special issue focus: The qualitative restudy

Guest Editors

• Tine Köhler, University of Melbourne, Australia

• Maria Rumyantseva, University of Sydney, Australia

• Catherine Welch, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

• Alex Bitektine, Concordia University, Canada

• Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham, UK

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2028

Restudies offer an empirical avenue for retheorizing: that is, they are studies that return to prior empirical work with the goal of reevaluating the theoretical conclusions that were generated from it. A restudy is an empirical study which is designed to enable systematic comparison with the original data, analytical results, and field setting of a prior study. In returning to established studies and their original empirical sites, qualitative restudies allow organization scholars to explore how our interpretations and theorizing are shaped by theoretical and methodological traditions, historical contexts, institutional structures, and researcher backgrounds. By acknowledging the situatedness of inquiry, restudies pave the way for more critical and sustained engagement with phenomena of interest, the populations and contexts in which we explore them, and the theoretical legacy on which we build our work (Köhler, Rumyantseva, & Welch, 2025; Rumyantseva & Welch, 2023).

Restudies can be approached in multiple ways. The four types of restudies identified in Köhler et al. (2025) serve as a methodological base for this Special Issue:

- Reanalysis - involves the reuse of the same dataset from a previous study (or as much of it as has been preserved or is accessible), without returning to the original research site to generate new data. The motivation for a reanalysis is to offer a new analytical perspective, with the scholar asking: What theoretical insights will a different reading of the data provide?

- Revisit - returns to the same research site or research participants as the original study to generate additional data related to events during and/or after the period covered by the original study. In contrast to a longitudinal study, a revisit does not constitute part of the original research design and is conducted independently. The motivation for such a study is to understand: How can the changes that have been observed in the site be theorized?

- Revision - makes use of and can extend the original dataset to offer an alternative theoretical lens and produce a rival explanation of the same events covered in a prior study. A revision is not a mere critique of the original study but an attempt to provide its sound theoretical replacement. The researcher will address the question: Why does the existing explanation fall short?

- Repurposing - includes the same research site or participants on which the original study was based. Rather than reusing the same dataset or research site, it generates meaningful links with the original study. The orienting question is: How can existing knowledge about the site/participants be used to inform a new study?

All four types of restudies exemplify research designs that are already used by OS scholars. For example, Beunza and Stark (2003, 2005) conducted a reanalysis to outline a new model of organizational recovery following the September 11 attacks. Cunha, Rego, Clegg, and Lindsay (2015) used a reanalysis to produce new theory, synthesizing successive, noncumulative interpretations of an exemplary empirical case: Honda’s entry into the US market. Crosina and Pratt revisited their original study of ex-Lehman bankers (Crosina & Pratt, 2019) to investigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, only to establish the unfaded centrality of Lehman’s influence on the lives of their respondents (Crosina, Sciarappa, & Pratt, 2025). Lê and Jarzabkowski (2017) have conducted a revision of their original study (Jarzabkowski & Lê, 2015) to reconceptualize conflict as paradoxical tension and show how this emerged through micro-practices of humor. Together with co-authors, April Wright repurposed their original study of emergency physicians in Australia during the Ebola epidemic (Wright, Meyer, Reay, & Staggs, 2021). Combining this study with data from management educators in the United Kingdom engaging in face-to-face teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic, they built a theoretical model of how perceptions of risks and their mitigation shape experiences of frontline professional workers (Wright, Pereira, Berrington, Felstead, & Staggs, 2024).

The Special Issue is open to and actively encourages other types of restudies that do not fall into the above typology but offer another way to retheorize by re-examining existing empirical studies. If authors engage in a different type of restudy design from the four mentioned above, it would be expected that they add a methodological emphasis in their paper to introduce that design and its retheorizing potential. All authors whose work is featured in the Special Issue will be encouraged to elaborate on their methodological decision-making, including in a designated appendix. By doing so, they will provide a roadmap for other researchers who wish to conduct their own restudies in the future.

Objectives and scope of the Special Issue

The purpose of this Special Issue is to diversify the theorizing potential of qualitative research methods in our field. More specifically, with this Special Issue, we aim to inspire the community of organization scholars to advance our knowledge of modern organizations and (dis)organizing by realizing the potential of qualitative restudies. Retheorizing by means of restudies can be done in the form of extending the original theorizing, reconstructing it in meaningful ways, refuting existing theories, or adding new lenses and theoretical perspectives. The Special Issue will equip organization scholars with the methodological, empirical, and theoretical foundations to strengthen retheorizing in the field. The empirical restudies featured in the Special Issue will act as exemplars for future research, providing inspiration for organizational scholarship to conduct restudies along similar lines.

In promoting novel research designs for retheorizing, this Special Issue makes a distinctive contribution to two pressing debates in the OS field: (1) How to expand avenues for theorizing and energize and renew theorizing efforts. Papers in this Special Issue have the opportunity to demonstrate the importance of returning to empirical fieldwork to inform theorizing. (2) The so-called replication crisis, which to date has either excluded qualitative research altogether, or threatened to impose inappropriate criteria on qualitative work (Pratt, Kaplan, & Whittington, 2020). Although qualitative research does not replicate in the same way quantitative work does – i.e., repeating an existing study to test if the result will be the same – it offers a powerful and theoretically generative alternative: Returning to an existing study with the expectation of a different theoretical result.

The growing interest in restudies has gained impetus from the changing nature of the social phenomena we explore. Given the scale of transformational changes, disruptive events, and crises that the world - and organizations - is currently experiencing, ‘we can no longer theorize with taken-for-granted assumptions’ (Quattrone & Zilber, 2025: 1090). Restudies are a set of research designs that assist with this endeavor, enabling organization scholars to return to familiar sites and theories in order to examine and develop a more refined understanding of what has changed and why. In particular, the Special Issue will demonstrate a set of methodological and theorizing tools, as well as examples of their application, to inspire new ways to address concerns of the journal’s readership around climate change, inequality, platform power and marginalized voices, bringing organization theory closer to the real world and its pressing issues. More specifically, the papers published in the special issue will push theoretical boundaries through their reexamination and reevaluation of existing theories, and likely offer novel theoretical avenues that are more suitable for the current academic, societal, and economic landscapes. Furthermore, the papers in the special issue will offer future researchers practical examples of how to advance theory revisions.

Restudies are a way for theories to stay both nuanced and relevant: We do not study unchanging phenomena but engage with a dynamic world that challenges our preconceptions of it. At the same time, methodological and theoretical trends evolve, affecting the lenses through which we view the phenomena we study. There is no single way to do a restudy, as restudies can be conducted on any established theories or empirical sites that are relevant to current debates and concerns in organization studies. This provides ample basis for a Special Issue that showcases a range of possibilities for approaching restudies.

Types of papers encouraged for submission to the Special Issue

In line with the focus of this Special Issue on methodological diversity to improve theorizing from existing work, we encourage a range of formats, including (1) empirical qualitative studies, (2) qualitative methods papers, (3) a combination of (1) and (2). The Special Issue is aligned with the position of the journal in that it does not support purely conceptual or review papers. In other words, novel theoretical contributions of submissions to the Special Issue need to (1) be based on empirical work and constitute a type of restudy or (2) offer a methodological contribution that advances our understanding of how to approach restudies. Our hope for the Special Issue is to represent qualitative work based on diverse theoretical, methodological, and philosophical traditions.

Given these objectives of the Special Issue, we will only be soliciting qualitative submissions. Accordingly, the use of machine learning (e.g., Natural Language Processing) does not fall within the scope of this special issue, as it is a quantitative analytical technique. The use of generative AI (i.e., LLMs) is also not appropriate for use in restudies, either for data collection or data analysis. The focus of retheorizing is underpinned by researchers’ critical reflective and interpretive skills. Prospective authors need to evaluate, reexamine, challenge, or refute previous interpretations and conclusions, all of which rely solely on human sensemaking and reasoning. Researchers also need to show deep temporal awareness and be able to question and problematize existing explanations for phenomena of interest. In addition, empirical work for restudies needs to consist of real data based on real people in real contexts, not via the use of synthetic (i.e., machine generated) data.

Potential topics and research designs

The Special Issue guest editor team welcomes submissions related to established theoretical traditions focused on organizations, organizing and disorganizing. We encourage submissions to look broadly at organization studies phenomena, theories, and contexts. Submissions from relevant sister disciplines that study organizations are also encouraged, such as restudies on organizations from sociology or business history perspectives.

The following represent promising starting points for restudy efforts:

- Seminal empirical research in organization studies: Do their theoretical conclusions still hold today and if not, why not?

- Iconic, high-profile organizations that have been regularly featured in past studies: Have they changed to such an extent that our understanding of them, and what they exemplify, is now misleading?

- Corporate failures and fallen heroes: Why were we so wrong about them, and what are the implications for current theories?

- Research settings undergoing major disruption and transformation: Are broader political and societal changes impacting organizations in such a way that they challenge our existing theoretical understanding?

- Access to previously inaccessible datasets: What do these new data sources reveal about empirical cases that we thought we knew?

- Methodological innovations: How does applying new methodological approaches change the conclusions we draw from existing data or cases?

- Epistemic shifts: Would the application of different onto-epistemological and theoretical lenses (e.g., feminism, hermeneutics, intersectionality, decolonial views) to core organizational phenomena lead us to different conclusions and interpretations and diversify our theoretical understanding?

Submission process

Manuscripts are to be submitted through the journal’s online submission system (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgstudies). Authors will need to create a user account, if they do not already have one, and must select the appropriate Special Issue for the “Manuscript Type” option. The Guest Editors handle all manuscripts in accordance with the journal’s policies and procedures. We expect authors to follow the journal’s submission guidelines (https://journals.sagepub.com/home/oss). Submissions to the Special Issue will be possible between January 17 and January 31, 2028. For administrative support and general queries, please contact Sophia Tzagaraki, Managing Editor of Organization Studies, for administrative support and general queries email osofficer@gmail.com.

Workshops

The guest editor team is planning a series of restudy method and paper development workshops: Onsite, online, and during major conferences, including at EGOS 2027 (sub-stream: Qualitative Restudies: Retheorizing in a Changing World; part of standing working group 14). Participation in workshops is not required for submission to the Special Issue. To receive announcements of forthcoming workshops, please register via the QR code below to be part of the restudies community:

References

Beunza, D., & Stark, D. (2003). The organization of responsiveness: Innovation and recovery in the trading rooms of Lower Manhattan. Socio-Economic Review, 1(2), 135-164. https://doi.org/10.1093/soceco/1.2.135

Beunza, D., & Stark, D. (2005). Resolving identities: Successive crises in a trading room after 9/11. In N. Foner (Ed.), Wounded city: The social impact of 9/11 on New York city (pp. 293–320). Russell Sage Foundation.

Crosina, E., & Pratt, M. G. (2019). Toward a model of organizational mourning: The case of former Lehman Brothers bankers. Academy of Management Journal, 62(1), 66-98. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2017.0140

Crosina, E., Sciarappa, S. L., & Pratt, M. G. (2025). Ties that bind and ties that break: The identification trajectories of bereft Lehman bankers. Academy of Management Perspectives, in print. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2023.0284

Cunha, M. P., Rego, A., Clegg, S., & Lindsay, G. (2015). The dialectics of serendipity. European Management Journal, 33(1), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.11.001

Jarzabkowski, P., & Lê, J.K. (2017). We have to do this and that? You must be joking: Constructing and responding to paradox through humor. Organization Studies, 38(3-4), 433-462. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840616640846

Köhler, T., Rumyantseva, M., & Welch, C. (2025). Qualitative restudies: Research designs for retheorizing. Organizational Research Methods, 28(1), 32-57. https://doi.org/10.1177/10944281231216323

Lê, J.K., & Jarzabkowski, P. (2015). The role of task and process conflict in strategizing. British Journal of Management, 26(3), 439-462. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12076

Pratt, M. G., Kaplan, S., & Whittington, R. (2020). Editorial essay: The tumult over transparency: Decoupling transparency from replication in establishing trustworthy qualitative research. Administrative Science Quarterly, 65(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839219887663

Quattrone, P., & Zilber, T. B. (2025). Theorizing in times of crisis, fragmentation and disorder. Organization Studies, 46(8), 1089-1094. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406251357722

Rumyantseva, M., & Welch, C. (2023). The Born Global and International New Venture revisited: An alternative explanation for early and rapid internationalization. Journal of International Business Studies, 54(7), 1193-1221. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267-023-00613-2

Wright, A. L., Meyer, A. D., Reay, T., & Staggs, J. (2021). Maintaining places of social inclusion: Ebola and the emergency department. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(1), 42-85. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839220916401

Wright, A. L., Pereira, S., Berrington, C., Felstead, D., & Staggs, J. (2024). Institutional logics, risk and extreme events: Insights from and for management education. British Journal of Management, 35(2), 550-565. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12813

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This week’s catch up features a campaign update regarding the campaign to ensure researcher access to the BBC Written Archives Centre (not looking too good), table of contents for the most recent issue of Business History, and some interesting journalistic takes on organizational history in Management Today and the Financial Times. We close with some forthcoming events and calls for contributions.

Contents

1. BBC Written Archives Centre Campaign Update

2. New issue of Business History out now: Volume 68, Issue 3

3. Historical topics in the press

4. Events and calls for papers

BBC Written Archives Centre Campaign Update

This is the latest update from the BBC Written Archives Centre Campaign.

We recently submitted evidence to the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Our contribution is an abbreviated version of the previous submission to DCMS with minor updates. You can read it here and we understand it will be published by the Committee at a later stage. We hope that its message of strengthening the Charter and Framework Agreement will be reflected in their final report.

Our campaign is now focused on the Parliamentary process of the Charter Review, but we remain in conversation with the BBC. A number of users attended the newstyled ‘information sharing session’ on 20 March. BBC representatives trailed the April release of files, but due to their rather esoteric nature it seems the press office was less keen on promotion. As expected it is a smaller selection than December’s release - c.800 compared to c.50,000 - and is outlined here.

The BBC has now made clear they have no intention of publishing even a basic list of the 50,000 files released just before Christmas. This is a truly baffling position, especially when there must have been a list made in order to do the release in the first place.

The government has published a new strategic vision for archives, commissioned from the National Archives. It is a modest but welcome document, and John Wyver in a recent blog considers how the WAC measures up against this new yardstick. We were pleased to see the Royal Historical Society promote this blog to its followers on Bluesky.

We have had some coverage lately including Times Higher Education and its follow up in the Times newspaper itself. Even the local BBC service is getting in on the act.

As ever, we are happy to hear from you if you need advice on using WAC during these challenging times, or if you just have an idea about how to advance the campaign. Collaborations with concerned organisations are particularly welcome.

With best wishes

Ian Greaves, Dr Kate Murphy and Professor John Wyver

Business History, Volume 68, Issue 3

Research Articles

Management and social order in ancient India

Jim Rooney & Vijaya Murthy

Convenience store retailing – The embedding of a new approach in the British retail landscape

Andrew Alexander

Ireland in a Danish mirror: A microlevel comparison of the productivity of Danish and Irish creameries before the First World War

Eoin McLaughlin, Paul Sharp, Xanthi Tsoukli & Christian Vedel

Freedom of contract and company freedom. Corporate governance in Norway, 1890–1930

Knut Sogner & Victoria Ciobanu Austveg

An entrepreneurial turf war: Travel agencies, ICEM, and the migration industry since the 1950s

Ioannis Limnios-Sekeris

From imposition to concession, from compliance to resistance: Creating a Harvard Business School clone in a Turkish university, 1954–1965

Behlül Üsdiken

Colonial capitalisation and business investment in the Federated Malay States in the interwar years

Mohd Shazwan Mokhtar

Why are corporations terminated? A century of evidence from the Netherlands

Christopher L. Colvin, Abe de Jong, Philip T. Fliers & Florian Madertoner

Kneeling to violent men: Investors and insurrection in Imperial Russia

Christopher A. Hartwell

Book Review

Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India

By Sudev Sheth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2024, xxiii + 353 pp., 22 figures (hardback) ISBN 9781009330268

Michael O’Sullivan

Playing the Percentages: How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System

By Derek Long, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2024, 296, photos, $55.00 (print), ISBN 9781477328941; $55 (epub), ISBN 9781477328965

Peter Miskell

Small, medium, large: How government made the U.S. into a manufacturing powerhouse

By Colleen A. Dunlavy, Polity Press, Cambridge UK and Hoboken NJ, 2024, pp. xiii 226, £25.00, ISBN 13 9781509561735 (hardback); £17.99 ISBN 9781509561728

Leslie Hannah

Business Power and the State in the Central Andes: Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru in Comparison

by John Crabtree, Francisco Durand, and Jonas Wolff, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2023, xiv + 265 pp, £29.50 (paperback), ISBN 978-0822947899

Edwin Lopez-Rivera

Management Today 60th Anniversary

Management Today publishes a piece on the history management featuring a veritable roll call of mostly UK-based business historians — check it out here.

In the FT, Soumaya Keynes explores whether economic history demonstrates that deeper economic links mean that war is less likely.

Gift article

Upcoming events and call for papers

Workshop. “Mujeres en la Historia de la Economía y la Empresa” || “Women in the History of Economics and Business” Badajoz (Spain) (hybrid), 15 - 16 October 2026, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Universidad de Extremadura. CFP deadline is May 30 2026.

Networks of Creative Persuasion in Advertising and Marketing — Conference at the Hagley Library, November 6, 2026. Submit proposals of no more than 500 words and a one-page C.V. to Carol Lockman at clockman@Hagley.org.

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A note before we start: successful grant-getters have a success rate of 1-in-3 to 1-in-5 (according to advice I received many, many years ago). The headline numbers are brutal, even when you are good at this. So this is not a recipe for never being rejected. It is about not being rejected for avoidable reasons (hopefully).

Catch-up service:

• Wanna be an academic? Embrace rejection (the resilience side of the same coin)

• How to Think About Your Research Outreach (visibility, which feeds future collaborators to you)

• Writing for Publication, Part 2 (because you need a credible CV with publications in the area in which you are applying)

Why listen to me?

I’m not the biggest grant-getter out there, but I have consistently applied for and received funding from reputable funders over the years in a field that generally receives very little funding. And with grant funding, context is important. Some subjects and topics are more fundable than others.

I have received extensive training and have seen many successful grant applications. I have been in research management positions where I had to sign off on all grants submitted, so I have seen how successful grant-getting teams work, and how junior scholars can build up their track record.

Funders are not (just) evaluating your CV

The first thing to internalise is that the panel is not really asking “is this PI good?” They are asking whether this specific team, with this specific mix of skills, can deliver this specific project. Your job is to make that judgment easy for them.

UK funders have made this fairly explicit. The current UKRI roles guidance (last updated August 2024) names distinct role types for project leads, co-leads and specialists, which is itself an instruction: most grand-challenge programmes expect teams that cross disciplines, and often sectors (Lyall and Fletcher, 2013). Solo proposals like fellowships rarely answer the bigger questions (but are relevant for you if you need to develop a funding track record). Team composition and dynamics also predict long-term research impact more reliably than individual credentials alone (Bednarek et al., 2024; Bennett and Gadlin, 2012).

The reviewers are more likely to read you generously if you make the team-fit argument well, and harshly if you don’t.

Assemble: the visible half

When you start sketching a team, you have to select for two things at once. The first is the visible half, which funders and reviewers can see on a CV.

After the jump, some reflection on the visible and the invisible work that an application has to do, what you should always negotiate early, and how you best present your team’s synergy in a grant application.

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The new FT50 list came out today at lunchtime, and there is a little bit of shocker in there for European management scholars and those of us who have benefited from the openness of certain journals towards historical research.

So, real win for AOM, and the disciplinary core journals… From the perspective of historical researchers in the field, not such good news.

The other really interesting thing, though, which as a member of the scientific committee of the Academic Journal Quality Guide, is this:

Beyond this, apparently, the review is ongoing and will also consider how to better distinguish influential practitioner journals, such as Harvard Business Review. For more information, visit the FT through the link below:

Updated FT50

This week’s roundup features a useful resource for anyone working on historical methods in management and organization studies — David Kirsch’s recent webinar on the New Scholars Network — and a new Hagley History Hangout podcast episode on American business in China at the moment of Communist victory in 1949.

Contents

1. Next Advanced Qualitative Research seminar 27 May, additional speaker sought

2. Using Historical Methods in Organization Studies on the New Scholars Network

3. Hagley History Hangout Podcast - New Episode: Americans Under the Chinese Communist Triumph: DuPont China, 1947-1950 with Sanjiao Tang

We are currently planning the next online AQR seminar for 27 May, 17:00 to 18:30 (UK time) and have one presentation slot available.

📣 If you would like to present research related to qualitative systematic literature review and discuss it with the AQR community, please contact the AQR coordinator Maxim Potepkin at mp833@kent.ac.uk . Each presentation includes 20 minutes for presentation and 20 minutes for discussion.

Once the programme, speakers and topics have been confirmed, we will circulate the full updated invitation.

Kind Regards,

Maxim

AQR Seminar Series Coordinator

Kent Business School

University of Kent

Using Historical Methods in Organization Studies on the New Scholars Network

There are some great scholarly sources out there - and the New Scholars YouTube channel has featured David Kirsch talking about historical methods in management:

New Scholars YouTube Channel

Click on the webinar titles below to learn about each session and to register. You can watch over 100 webinars on YouTube and join our LinkedIn group. In addition, join a free in-person RRBM PDW in Poland - see details below.

If your research explores novelty, technology and transformation, we are launching a new WhatsApp group to foster connections and conversations.

Join here.

Forthcoming webinars

Crafting Interdisciplinary Research:

Pathways for Management Scholarship

Caroline Gatrell

Corinne Post

Christopher Wickert

May 13

Causal Mechanisms in Management Research:

Reflections and Directions

Joep Cornelissen

Mirjam Werner

June 10

RRBM PDW In-person

Doing Impactful Research in the Age of GenAI

Hosted by

Kozminski University

Warsaw, Poland

June 22

­

Ibrat Djabbarov, PhD

www.ibratdjabbarov.com

­

New Scholars is supported by

Hagley History Hangout Podcast - New Episode

Americans Under the Chinese Communist Triumph: DuPont China, 1947-1950 with Sanjiao Tang

Tune in here or wherever you find your podcasts: https://www.hagley.org/research/history-hangout-sanjiao-tang

Americans had established schools, hospitals, and businesses in China prior to the 1949 triumph of the Communists under Mao. What would be the fate of these institutions and their staff under the new dispensation?

In his latest research, Dr. Sanjiao Tang, fellow at the National Library of Australia, explores the actions and reactions of Americans facing the advent of the People’s Republic of China. Using the DuPont firm as a representative American business of the period, Sanjiao finds that most Americans had a “wait and see” attitude toward Mao’s initial triumph. DuPont China only shut down its Shanghai headquarters a year after the Communist victory, doing so shortly before a wave of Anti-American sentiment expropriated the remaining American institutions in China.

In support of his research, Dr. Sanjiao received funding from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. For more information, and more Hagley History Hangouts, visit us online at hagley.org.

And that is the best case. It is writing by committee.

So below, some more tips & tricks how to navigate this process.

Catch-up service:

• Writing for publication: what nobody tells you – Part 1

• Publishing Strategies for Historical Researchers in Management

• Wanna be an academic? Embrace rejection

What your editor actually needs from you

There is a widely cited piece by Grant and Pollock (2011) in AMJ — “Setting the Hook” — that provides useful guidance on structuring introductions. It identifies four moves: establish why the reader should care about the problem, show what is missing or unresolved in existing work, state precisely what your paper does, and preview what the reader gains. These four moves should fit on three pages, maybe five. If your introduction is still scene-setting on page ten, it is not ready.

Writing openings

The underlying logic is the classic rhetorical structure: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. What do we know? What unsettles it? What does your paper do about that? Booth, Colomb and Williams’s The Craft of Research remains the most practical guide to actually writing this structure into an opening — the exercise they propose of drafting “I am studying X because I want to find out Y, in order to help my reader understand Z” is a useful diagnostic for whether you have a real argument or just a topic. It is not complicated in principle. Learning the art of setting up these openings will get you past the desk reject stage more often.

Don’t forget to set up the research question here - in many management journals, an explicit question is expected.

Research questions flow from research problems. Often, people are taught to identify a gap, but this is not always the most compelling way to set up work. Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) developed an alternative approach, which they termed problematization. This functions as a methodology — problematization as a way to identify and challenge the assumptions underlying the existing literature, rather than merely spotting gaps in it. The distinction matters: gap-spotting produces incremental work; problematization is what produces interesting theory.

The cover letter

The cover letter gets neglected — I am certainly guilty of this. Wiser people than me have pointed out, very reasonably, that the cover letter is where you can make the editor’s job easier:

• Summarise the contribution in two or three sentences.

• Make the case for fit with this specific journal.

• Suggest potential reviewers.

One page. What you are doing is handing the editor the argument they need to send the paper out, rather than desk-rejecting it.

On rejection

We’ve talked about rejection before, and it is inherent in this activity.

After the jump, what the different types of rejection (yes, there is more than one!) mean when you are trying to publish your work.

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