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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.

Read more

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.

Read more

This week’s roundup provides you with an early view of another history-themed call for papers for the EGOS conference 2027 in Liverpool, UK, on “The Past Through Games of Power”, alongside a free online qualitative research conference in May, hosted by Northeastern University, USA, and the Canadian Business History Association reading group in Toronto later this month.

Contents

1. The Past Through Games of Power: Memory and Organizational History,

   Call for Papers, 43rd EGOS Colloquium in Liverpool, July 8–10, 2027

2. Northeastern Qualitative Research Conference (online)

3. Canadian Business History Association Reading Group, Toronto & hybrid, 24 April

The Past Through Games of Power: Memory and Organizational History

Call for Papers - 43rd EGOS Colloquium in Liverpool, July 8–10, 2027

Convenors:

• Amon Barros, FGV EAESP, Brazil, amon.barros@fgv.br

• Hamid Foroughi, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK, h.foroughi@wbs.ac.uk

• Gabrielle Durepos, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada, gabrielle.durepos@msvu.ca

The sub-theme “Games of Memory and Power in Organizational History” invites analyses of how organizational actors use traces of the past as a resource to develop persuasive narratives and play political games in and around organizations (Suddaby, Israelsen, Bastien, et al., 2023). Interpretations of the past can be cultivated as memories that circulate within and across organizations (Coraiola et al., 2023) or as narratives that carry moral meanings and frame how actors interpret the past, present, and future (Hampel & Dalpiaz, 2023; Hernes & Schultz, 2020; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005).

Interpretations of the past and the traces on which they rely are always situated in place and time and shaped by power relations (Durepos & Thurlow, 2025; Wanderley & Barros, 2019). Disputes over how the past should be interpreted can turn into conflicts over meanings within, where actors seek to impose meaning on the vastness of the past within the constraints of culture (Suddaby, Israelsen, Bastien, et al., 2023; Vaara & Whittle, 2022). Research on the uses of the past by organizational actors has established that narratives of continuity and rupture are the result of political disputes in which groups seek to establish belonging or exclusion through them (Foroughi, 2020).

Struggles about remembering and forgetting take many forms. From the meaning attributed to objects (Shortt & Izak, 2021), the design and uses of architectural spaces (Decker, 2014; Decker et al., 2024), and intentional narratives designed to narrate histories like corporate museums (Hatfield, 2024; Nissley & Casey, 2002), power games frame the past. Remembering and forgetting are situated outcomes from disputes, and even non-events and paths not taken continue to influence interpretations (Egholm, 2026). For instance, museums often naturalize the past or invite contestation of established meanings through strategies of display and narration (Aroles et al., 2024). The erasure of slavery from the management discipline is a paradigmatic case of forgetting (Cooke, 2003). Historiographical devices such as periodization (Sadeghi et al., 2024), turning points (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007; Marquis & Qiao, 2024), and founding moments (Suddaby, Israelsen, Mitchell, et al., 2023) are not neutral. They result from choices that privilege actors, geographies, and causal stories while marginalizing others (Durepos & Thurlow, 2025; Durepos & Barros, 2023; Wanderley & Barros, 2019).

This stream invites studies that consider memory not as a repository but as a practice that gives meaning to the past through contested practices. It invites studies investigating the effects of power on remembering and forgetting (Casey & Olivera, 2011; Coraiola et al., 2023; Mena et al., 2016).

Submissions can explore this theme in various contexts. Below are some questions (not exhaustive):

• How do power games within organizations use history to legitimize strategic agendas or delegitimize alternative interpretations, and with what consequences?

• How do powerful actors shape which events become remembered, forgotten, or silenced in official organizational histories?

• How do competing memories coexist, clash, or become reconciled in contexts where organizational histories are contested?

• How can corporate museums, heritage initiatives, or even sites and objects become arenas for negotiating competing representations of the past?

• How do historiographical devices (e.g., periodization, turning points, founding stories) become tools of power that privilege some voices and exclude others?

• How do practices of forgetting—intentional or unintentional—serve political purposes within organizations?

• How do actors strategically curate traces of the past to craft organizational identity, continuity, or rupture?

• How do employees resist, reinterpret, or subvert dominant narratives about the organizational past?

• How do transnational, postcolonial, or multi-sited organizations negotiate the politics of memory across different cultural or geographic contexts?

• How do digital technologies and algorithmic curation reshape the politics of remembering and forgetting within organizations?

References

Aroles, J., Morrell, K., Granter, E., & Liang, Y. (2024). Representing, Re‑presenting, or Producing the Past? Memory Work amongst Museum Employees. Journal of Management Studies, joms.13059. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13059

Capoccia, G., & Kelemen, R. D. (2007). The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narrative, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism. World Politics, 59(3), 341–369. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887100020852

Casey, A. J., & Olivera, F. (2011). Reflections on Organizational Memory and Forgetting. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(3), 305–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492611408264

Cooke, B. (2003). The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies. Journal of Management Studies, 40(8), 1895–1918. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1467-6486.2003.00405.x

Coraiola, D. M., Foster, W. M., Mena, S., Foroughi, H., & Rintamäki, J. (2023). Ecologies of memories: Memory work within and between organizations and communities. Academy of Management Annals, 17(1), 373–404.

Decker, S. (2014). Solid intentions: An archival ethnography of corporate architecture and organizational remembering. Organization, 21(4), 514–542. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508414527252

Decker, S., Giovannoni, E., & Plakoyiannaki, E. (2024). A microhistory of architecture historical imagination and the Bauhaus. Management & Organizational History, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2024.2423095

Durepos, G., & Barros, A. (2023). Haunted Houses: Addressing Archival Silences in Business (Hi)Storytelling (pp. 29–47). https://doi.org/10.1142/9789811273476_0002

Durepos, G., & Thurlow, A. (2025). Archival Research in Historical Organisation Studies: Theorizing Silences. Bingley: Emerald.

Egholm, L. (2026). Shadow futures: the persistence of past futures. Management & Organizational History, 21(1–2), 81–91.

Foroughi, H. (2020). Collective Memories as a Vehicle of Fantasy and Identification: Founding stories retold. Organization Studies, 41(10), 1347–1367. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840619844286

Hampel, C. E., & Dalpiaz, E. (2023). Confronting the Contested Past: Sensemaking and Rhetorical History in the Reconstruction of Organizational Identity. Academy of Management Journal, 66(6), 1711–1740. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2020.1132

Hatfield, J. E. (2024). Branding public memory in the Walmart Museum. Memory Studies, 17506980241255075. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241255075

Hernes, T., & Schultz, M. (2020). Translating the Distant into the Present: How actors address distant past and future events through situated activity. Organization Theory, 1(1), 263178771990099. https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787719900999

Marquis, C., & Qiao, K. (2024). History Matters for Organizations: An Integrative Framework for Understanding Influences from the Past. Academy of Management Review, amr.2022.0238. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2022.0238

Mena, S., Rintamäki, J., Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2016). On the Forgetting of Corporate Irresponsibility. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), 720–738. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2014.0208

Nissley, N., & Casey, A. (2002). The politics of the exhibition: Viewing corporate museums through the paradigmatic lens of organizational memory. British Journal of Management, 13(S2), S35–S45.

Sadeghi, Y., Islam, G., & Van Lent, W. (2024). Practices of Periodization: Towards a Critical Perspective on Temporal Division in Organizations. Academy of Management Review, amr.2022.0396. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2022.0396

Shortt, H., & Izak, M. (2021). Scarred objects and time marks as memory anchors: The significance of scuffs and stains in organisational life. Human Relations, 74(10), 1688–1715. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726720938848

Suddaby, R., & Greenwood, R. (2005). Rhetorical strategies of legitimacy. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(1), 35–67. http://asq.sagepub.com/content/50/1/35.short

Suddaby, R., Israelsen, T., Bastien, F., Saylors, R., & Coraiola, D. (2023). Rhetorical History as Institutional Work. Journal of Management Studies, 60(1), 242–278. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12860

Suddaby, R., Israelsen, T., Mitchell, J. R., & Lim, D. S. K. (2023). Entrepreneurial Visions as Rhetorical History: A Diegetic Narrative Model of Stakeholder Enrollment. Academy of Management Review, 48(2), 220–243. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2020.0010

Vaara, E., & Whittle, A. (2022). Common Sense, New Sense or Non-Sense? A Critical Discursive Perspective on Power in Collective Sensemaking. Journal of Management Studies, 59(3), 755–781. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12783

Wanderley, S., & Barros, A. (2019). Decoloniality, geopolitics of knowledge and historic turn: Towards a Latin American agenda. Management & Organizational History, 14(1), 79–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2018.1431551

Convenors’ short biographies

And don’t forget the other history-themed track:

Northeastern Qualitative Research Conference registration open

Registration is now open for the 2026 Northeastern Qualitative Research Conference!

May 13^th 10 AM – 1 PM EST: Virtual & Free

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/4c7a97rr

This year’s conference tackles two of the most pressing conversations in qualitative research:

• Abduction in Qualitative Research

• Transparency in the Age of AI

We have an incredible schedule:

10:00: Introduction - Stine Grodal, Northeastern University

10:10: Abduction in Qualitative Research

• David Kirsch, University of Maryland

• Iddo Tavory, NYU

• Stefan Timmermans, UCLA

• Saku Mantere, McGill

11:30: Plenary by Ann Langley, HEC Montreal

11:50: Transparency in the Age of AI

• Lamar Pierce, Washington University

• Christine Beckman, UCSB

• Anne-Laure Fayard, Nova School of Business & Economics

• Kevin Corley, Imperial College London

12:50: Conclusion

Check out some of the videos from the past years here: https://www.youtube.com/@QualConference/videos

CBHA Reading Group

The Details:

24 April, 2026

4:30-6:00 pm

University of Toronto

Sidney Smith Hall Room SS2098

This session, we welcome Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School) to discuss her recent work exploring Arthur H. Cole as a key architect of business and entrepreneurial history, showing how he built the field through an interdisciplinary research agenda, but also why his work never became canonical. It argues that Cole’s most lasting insights were to study entrepreneurship without heroic “great man” narratives and to explain it instead as a socially embedded process linking individual decision-making, institutional ecosystems, and public legitimacy.

We also welcome Kathleen Durocher (PhD candidate, Université du Québec à Montréal) to talk about a chapter from her dissertation regarding efforts to prohibit white phosphorus matches in Canada between 1910 and 1914, a campaign that was met by sometimes fierce opposition from industry and politicians. Ultimately, legislation was passed, a victory enabled by a shifting international context and lobbying by chemist Robert Fulford Ruttan, with support from the Royal Society of Canada. This chapter is in French and includes a detailed English summary. The discussion will be in English.

A hybrid option will be available for those unable to attend in-person.

Please contact jean-philip.mathieu@mcgill.ca to be added to the event mailing list and receive both papers.

Limited funding is available for PhD candidates who would like to travel to Toronto and whose research would benefit from participating in the reading group. Please email Jean-Philip for more information.

We look forward to seeing some of you there!

Catch-up service:

• Publishing Strategies for Historical Researchers in Management

• Wanna be an Academic? Embrace Rejection

• Is AI taking over Social Science? Part 1 & Part 2

The numbers are worse than you think

Not to be alarmist, rejection rates at leading management journals range from 80 to 95%. And that was before AI supercharged the production of the written word. However, having been an editor for many years and responsible for desk rejects, I have seen numerous submissions that are simply out of scope and irrelevant. So, there is no reason to be too disheartened.

Unless, of course, you are desk rejected many, many times. Then, you may need to consider whether a full reset is necessary. One thing I have noticed is that novices to academic publishing systematically underestimate how much work is required to get an article published.

The other thing I sometimes encountered is an ends-means orientation: I want tenure (or a safe academic position, or a safe academic position at a better, more research-oriented university), so I need more and better publications, and how can I achieve this as soon as possible?

That’s nice.

But it’s not the responsibility of the editors, the reviewers, or indeed of the academic community reading the journal. Your job situation is absolutely none of their concern. Nobody is forcing you to become an academic; that is a choice. Maybe you begin to realise that it is not as good a choice as you thought. (Welcome to the club.) I have known many colleagues and students who changed their minds about wanting to be a part of academia. Exit is fine.

After the jump, what do you need to know if you want to play journal game … for paid subscribers, or you can redeem one free read. Also, you’ll get a reading list of useful articles written by experienced academics and editors that have published pieces seeking to de-mystify the academic publishing process.

Read more

Contents

1. News briefing: Scholars urge BBC to rethink changes to archive access

2. Job Advert: 2 Postdoctoral Positions in the Global History of Rubber

3. Announcement: 16th OAP Workshop announces keynote speaker

Scholars urge BBC to rethink changes to archive access

Historians say their ability to study material held in ‘mother lode of all 20th-century archives’ diminished by long suspension of vetting requests

Full article in Times Higher Education.

Call for Applicants: 2 Postdoctoral Positions in the Global History of Rubber

The Institute of History at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is recruiting 2 postdoctoral researchers for the ERC Consolidator Grant Project ‘WILDHIST – Wild Rubber in the Industrial Age: A Global History of Production’, led by Dr. David Pretel.

Postdoc 1. The history of rubber production in the Amazon rainforest.
Postdoc 2. The history of rubber production in the Congo Basin.

Please send your application to david.pretel@csic.es and andrea.yanez@csic.es

Project Description

The Project WILDHIST aims to offer a comprehensive, multi-sited and multi-scale global history of wild rubber production during the industrial age. It investigates the hypothesis that wild rubber industries in the tropical rainforests of Africa and Latin America were key sites in the broader dynamics of industrialisation and scientific research from the early 19th century to the Second World War, forming an integral part of the era’s expanding global networks of knowledge exchange. The project moves beyond plantations to focus on wild production and smallholders’ cultivation in rainforests, emphasizing production processes rather than consumption or trade, and placing much stronger emphasis on the study of exploration, extraction, processing, transportation, experimentation, and manufacturing than has been typical of historical research on rainforest commodities.

WILDHIST combines an analysis of contrasting non-plantation histories of rubber production in the Amazon, Congo Basin and so-called Maya Forest with broader histories of transnational interaction. The project rethinks and rewrites the global history of wild rubber by systematically and critically exploring a rich array of written, visual and oral sources located throughout the world. Its trans-local, interdisciplinary, comparative, digital and visual methodology will provide a comprehensive historical account of how rubber was transformed into commodities and then final goods for local, regional or global markets. Beyond academia, WILDHIST contributes to discussions about bioprospecting, sustainability and labour in rainforests. To address the challenge of writing more inclusive histories of science, technology, and industrialisation, the project also considers collective memory as represented in museums, material culture, and industrial heritage.

The project has three objectives:
1) Studying the actors, techniques, skills, knowledge and relations of production at rainforests’ rubber frontiers;
2) Reconstructing, mapping and analysing the transnational chains of rubber production, including networks of science and expertise;
3) Exploring the visual representation of rubber production throughout the world using tools of digital and spatial humanities.

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101171213

Requirements

Research Field
History

Education Level
PhD or equivalent

Skills/Qualifications

• PhD in history, history of science, economic history or associated fields (Latin American studies, African studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, digital humanities), and a strong interest in the project.

• Good command of written and spoken English and, depending on research specialisation, Portuguese, Spanish and/or French.

• Be based in Madrid for the duration of the project.

• Expected to publish articles, book chapters, and/or a book manuscript / edited volume.

• Ability to collaborate within a team and to work independently

Languages
ENGLISH, good level

Research Field
History

Additional Information

Benefits

• A three-year contract (full-time).
• A gross salary of 43,827 EUR.
• A fully equipped workspace at the Institute of History.
• Funding for research-related purposes, participation in international conferences, and organisation of events.
• Mentorship in applying for tenure-track and tenure positions at CSIC.

Additional comments

HOW TO APPLY:
Your application must include the following documents:
• Motivation letter (1 page).
• Research proposal outlining the work you would undertake while on the WILDHIST project (1 page).
• Curriculum Vitae.
• Writing sample: PhD thesis, article or book chapter.

Please send your application to david.pretel@csic.es and andrea.yanez@csic.es
Application deadline: 24 April 2026.

16th OAP Workshop announces keynote speaker

Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to announce that Professor Andrew Pickering will be the opening keynote speaker of the 16th OAP Workshop, taking place on June 3–4, 2026 at CBS.

This year’s edition promises to be particularly rich and engaging, featuring two panels, three keynote lectures, around sixty presentations, and dedicated sessions for the 10th Dauphine Philosophy Workshop (program online very soon). OAP 2026 will once again bring together a vibrant international community to discuss cutting-edge research across a wide range of topics.

We warmly invite you to register and secure your participation via the following link:
https://www.tilmeld.dk/oap2026

In addition, we are pleased to highlight a special pre-event that will take place on June 2 at the French Embassy in Copenhagen: the first GeoHos Workshop. This event will focus on historical and geopolitical perspectives and theories of organizations. Registration is open and free, and can be completed here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdYGOecxcRSV2oRCt2_KbWwYydLWQq0NYCmlZKsO_6wcEJqIw/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=100923006067412553031

We very much hope to see many of you in Copenhagen for these exciting events.

Best regards,

The OC of OAP 2026

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Like the new digest format? Or do you prefer the old individual posts? Tell us!

Catch-up service:

• Wanna be an Academic? Embrace Rejection

• BBC Archives Campaign update

• Is AI taking over Social Science? Part 1 & Part 2

The first is clearly not true — academics hire other academics. And if they are obsessed with simplistic metrics, perhaps consider whether that will be a good workplace. But what then is a good publishing strategy for historical researchers in management?

We’ll look at why to publish, and why “to get a job” is not enough. In this post, we will look at how to find the right journal for you, prepare your research for publication by thinking about your audience, and, crucially, provide pointers for your editor. How do you work with journal lists? What do you need to look out for if you are planning an international career? Finally, how do you target business history AND management journals?

Paid subscribers also get a journal list with international rankings. And more curated readings - blogosphere, journalism and podcasts.

Read more

Convenors:

• Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham, UK, S.decker@bham.ac.uk

• Valeria Giacomin, Bocconi University, Italy, Valeria.giacomin@unibocconi.it

• Nicholas Wong, Northumbria University, UK, Nicholas.d.wong@northumbria.ac.uk

Description of sub-theme

This sub-theme examines how boundaries between work and play have been historically constructed, challenged, and transformed within organisational life. While current debates focus on issues like gamification, work-life balance, and the playfulness of digital capitalism, we contend that these trends are rooted in deeper historical tensions that remain insufficiently explored. By contextualising how people in organisations have understood, policed, celebrated, or worried about the relationship between work and play, we uncover the contingent assumptions that continue to influence modern organisations.

The sub-theme title invokes both folk wisdom (“all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) and historical ideologies that sought to eliminate playfulness from “serious” business. This deliberate ambiguity reflects our interest in the tensions, contradictions, and struggles that have characterised the work-play relationship across time. This sub-theme will address several core issues, including: How have organisations attempted to harness, regulate, or eliminate playful practices? What forms of resistance, creativity, and subversion have emerged through workplace play? And how have shifting conceptions of human nature, from Johan Huizinga’s homo ludens (the playful human) to the dominant model of homo economicus, influenced organisational forms and management practices over time? How did sectors focused on innovation or creative products engage with the paradoxical tensions between “work” and “play”? How have entrepreneurs in creative and cultural industries developed business models to monetise “play” to form a profit-making enterprise? Ultimately, the sub-theme will explore how historical analyses contribute to the business and organisation of play.

A historical perspective complements the central conference theme by examining the deep genealogies of modern forms and interactions of work and play, and how they have evolved. As the colloquium call notes, play sits alongside our nature as creative beings and our instrumental tendencies; play is spontaneous but can also risk becoming unrestrained, and games influence social life while encouraging creativity, innovation, resistance, and subversion. These tensions are not new. By historicising them, we can better understand how “the rules of the game” have become ingrained in organisations, the very institutions that shape contemporary economic activities (North, 1990; Suddaby, Foster & Mills, 2014), and how they have evolved, been written, rewritten, and contested over time.

Themes and Questions

We welcome submissions that address any aspect of the historical relationship between work, play, organising, and business, including, but not limited to:

• How did industrialisation, scientific management (Taylor, 1911), and Protestant work ethics reshape what counted as legitimate labour?

• When and how did contemporary “gamification” emerge as a reversal – or intensification – of these historical separations?

• What historical anxieties have surrounded leisure, workplace drinking cultures, and “time theft”? How do they relate to contemporary “quiet quitting”? How does organisation theory consider people beyond the homo economicus model, as “homo ludens” (Huizinga, 1949)?

Creativity, creative industries and entrepreneurship: the role of imagination

• How did professional management’s claims to scientific legitimacy and the delegitimisation of “mere entertainment” industries create hierarchies between serious work and frivolous play? (Taylor, 1911)

• What assumptions about competition, rationality, and success are embedded in management simulations, board games, and role-playing exercises?

• Are all forms of imagination playful? How do we interpret “disciplined imagination” (Weick, 1989), or indeed the methodological “historical imagination” (Decker et al., 2025)?

Organised play at work: company culture through the ages

• How have training technologies like gamification evolved from analogue to digital forms, and what do they reveal about changing ideas of work and play?

• How have organisations used ceremonial events, office parties, sports competitions, and social clubs to build culture, foster loyalty, or manage workers (Decker, 2014; Gillett & Tennent, 2025)?

• What can the history of corporate paternalism, welfare capitalism, and team-building exercises tell us about the politics of organised fun (Hassard, 2012)?

Resistance through play: shifting the boundary of acceptability

• How have workers used humour, pranks, informal games, and sabotage to resist managerial control? When does playfulness become transgressive or pose a threat to organisational order (McKinlay, 2002; Decker, 2014)?

• What can shop-floor culture, pageantry, and historic forms of “playing with the rules” teach us about the relationship between play, innovation, and power (Decker et al. 2025)?

Performance and Business of Play

• How have businesses historically presented themselves through spectacle, entertainment, and game-like displays (Gillett & Tennent, 2025; Tennent & Gillet, 2022)?

• What role have Trade Fairs, department store theatrics, advertising contests, and industrial exhibitions played in making commerce entertaining (Wong & McGovern, 2023)?

• How have cultural entrepreneurs formed profit-seeking enterprises in the ‘play’ sector through the manufacture and retail of cultural goods (Wong & McGovern, 2023)?

• How have entrepreneurial pursuits in the ‘toys’ and ‘play-things’ sector been reframed as profit-seeking (Giacomin & Lubinski, 2023)?

We invite submissions from scholars interested in both qualitative and quantitative research, including interviews, document-based studies, archival research, and oral histories. We especially welcome papers that engage with historical sources, such as company archives, worker diaries, management journals, photographs, and material artefacts, to situate their analyses within specific organisational contexts and time periods.

By introducing historical perspective to modern debates about gamification, workplace culture, the limits of acceptable organisational behaviour, and the business of play, this sub-theme deepens understanding of how today’s organisational games developed, what alternatives were available, and what opportunities remain for reimagining the relationship between work and play.

References

Cappellaro, G., Compagni, A., & Vaara, E. (2021). Maintaining strategic ambiguity for protection: Struggles over opacity, equivocality, and absurdity around the Sicilian mafia. Academy of Management Journal, 64(1), 1–37. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMJ.2017.1086

Decker, S. (2014). Solid Intentions: An Archival Ethnography of Corporate Architecture and Organizational Remembering. Organization, 21(4), 514–542. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508414527252

Decker, S., Giovannoni, E., & Plakoyiannaki, E. (2025). A Microhistory of Architecture: Historical Imagination and the Bauhaus. Management & Organizational History, 20(4), 453-477.

Giacomin, V., & Lubinski, C. (2023). Entrepreneurship as emancipation: Ruth Handler and the entrepreneurial process “in time” and “over time,” 1930s–1980s. Business History, 65(7), 1159–1178.

Gillett, A., & Tennent, Kevin. Daniel. (2025). Foundations of Managing British Olympics: Institutions through Time. (Frontiers of Management History). Emerald. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-095-5

Hassard, J. S. (2012). Rethinking the Hawthorne Studies: The Western Electric research in its social, political and historical context. Human Relations, 65(11), 1431–1461. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726712452168

Huizinga, J. (1949). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Huizinga, J. (2006). The Nature and Significance of Play. In K. Salen & E. Zimmerman (Eds), The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (pp. 96–120). The MIT Press.

McKinlay, A. (2002). `Dead Selves’: The Birth of the Modern Career. Organization, 9(4), 595–614. https://doi.org/10.1177/135050840294005

North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. In J. Alt & D. North (Eds), Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions. Cambridge University Press.

Nyland, C., Bruce, K., & Burns, P. (2014). Taylorism, the International Labour Organization, and the Genesis and Diffusion of Codetermination. Organization Studies, 35(8), 1149–1169. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840614525388

Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M., & Mills, A. J. (2014). Historical Institutionalism. In M. Bucheli & R. D. Wadhwani (Eds), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods (pp. 100–123). Oxford University Press.

Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.

Tennent, K. D., & Gillett, A. G. (n.d.). Explicating archival ethnography: Helmut Käser’s business trip. Management & Organizational History, 0(0), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2024.2423092

Tennent, K. D., & Gillett, A. (2022). A Brief History of the FIFA World Cup as a Business. In S. Chadwick, P. Widdopp, C. Anagnostopoulos, & D. Parnell (Eds.), The Business of the FIFA World Cup (first edition) (1 ed.). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003121794

Weick, K. E. (1989). Theory construction as disciplined imagination. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 516–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/258556

Wong, N., & McGovern, T. (2023). Entrepreneurial strategies in a family business: growth and capital conversions in historical perspective. Business History, 65(3), 454-478. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1807952

Convenors

Stephanie Decker, FAcSS, FBAM, is Professor of Strategy and Birmingham Business School and Vice Dean of BAM Fellows. She has contributed to interdisciplinary research that draws on historical knowledge to expand and problematise management knowledge. Her work spans methodological and theoretical issues, as well as empirical research on the role of international business in global contexts that are often underrepresented in business research, such as Africa. She was joint editor-in-chief of Business History from 2020-24.

Valeria Giacomin is Assistant Professor of Economic and Business History at Bocconi University, Milan. Her research explores the historical evolution of global business networks, emerging markets, and organizational adaptation across regions. She has published in Business History, Journal of Business Ethics and Journal of Management Studies, focusing on clustering, agglomeration, and the role of cities in the globalization of business. Her current work explores corporate strategy, branding, and legal governance through historical case studies, ranging from toy companies and global consumer industries to urban clusters and financial centers.

Nicholas Wong is Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University and Deputy Convenor of the Responsible Business Research Group. Nick is Associate Editor of Business History, Editorial Board Member at Academy of Management Perspectives and Editor of SAGE Business Cases in Business History. He is also Co-Chair of the Management and Business History Division at the British Academy of Management and Treasurer of the Association of Business Historians. He has published in, amongst others, Academy of Management Perspectives, Business History, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Journal of Management Inquiry.

I think I may have promised a post on publishing strategy for a while, and that is nearly ready. Then I realised this post is going out on Good Friday, and whether you are of this religion or not, it is definitely a Bank Holiday in many places. So it feels a bit too much like work to write about publishing strategy.

Instead, this is a bit of a reflection on rejections, rituals and authenticity as the important wayposts of academic life.

Embrace rejection

One of the best bosses I ever had (Nigel Driffield, now at Warwick) said one lunchtime, a long, long time ago: “If you are not getting rejected, what have you been doing?!”

When I told one of our PR people, many years later, that yes, we all get rejected, it is not a problem, he went all charming and said, oh no, of course not, you do not get rejected!

Well, I was genuinely nonplussed. Rejection is normal in academic work. It makes for good battle stories to share over a drink.

After the jump, some more reflections on why rejection is one of the most important ingredients of an academic, or possibly any, career.

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TOC Volume 68, Issue 2​, ​March 2026

Banking failure and regulatory reform on the periphery: The Kwong Yik Bank in the British Straits Settlements

Jeremy Goh

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2512862

British business-government relationships: A case study of the Burmah Oil Company, 1974–1975

Shraddha Verma; John F. Wilson; Philip Linsley; Neveen Abdelrehim

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2503722

Business schools and museum learning in historical perspective: Lessons from the forgotten history of commercial school museums

Adrien Jean-Guy Passant

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2510299

Convergent evolution towards the joint-stock company

David Le Bris; William N. Goetzmann; Sébastien Pouget

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2478880

Greytown is No More! The 1854 Razing of a Central American Port, the U.S. Businesses Behind Its Demise, and the Lasting Foreign Policy Legacy

Gary Bugh

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2024.2375916

Helping the poor help themselves: Social enterprise and Ireland’s peculiar microfinance revolution, c. 1836–1845

Eoin McLaughlin; Rowena Pecchenino

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2466655

History is prologue: Impact of closed economy imprints (1956–1991) on investments in innovation by Indian firms

Lakshmi Goyal; Manish Popli

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2512871

Job switching and knowledge transfer: The case of Norwegian mining and metallurgy, 1787–1940

Kristin Ranestad

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2473993

Kicking away the ladder? Trade, technology transfer, and Chinese-East German disputes on the development of precision mechanics and optical industry

Tao Chen

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2512873

Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade

Guting Shen

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2024.2384304

Regulatory capture in the first Spanish Nuclear Program (c.1951-64)?

Josean Garrues-Irurzun; Juan A. Rubio-Mondejar

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2482624

The experience of free banking, second edition

Andrew Allison

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2024.2376258

UK investment trusts and the Baring crisis

Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos; Daniele Tori; Janette Rutterford

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2025.2464811

Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and monopoly in British Telecommunications

Christoffer Friedl

https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2024.2364568

In contrast to early hopes that AI may become the great leveller in terms of access, the interaction of technology and professional stratification is rarely that straightforward. A recent HEPI report showed that students are sharply divided on whether AI contributes to their learning or hinders it. I find this polarisation not at all surprising, and we are already seeing it with academics.

Knowing how to use AI well, which tool, and for which tasks, is still in the exploration stage. And right now, the debate is dominated by the quants researchers.

With the toxicity of this debate at an all-time high, I agree with Kustov that AI disclosure is simply not viable right now. I heard from a colleague (mostly quants, some mixed methods) that they had something rejected for disclosing their use of AI in a responsible manner. And I do not doubt it. It’s the vibe, and even when a journal has an AI policy, you risk having your work dismissed even if you used AI responsibly and checked everything (which usually takes so long it often negates the purported productivity advantage).

In the BAM AI White Paper, which I co-authored, we called for responsible AI disclosure. But in our recent podcast, I was a lot less confident about that:

So, how well you can use AI will increasingly matter, and it will also make all the difference whether people can tell that you used it or not.

Knowing how to navigate the jagged frontier

One of the best examples of this is Adam Kucharski’s recent blog “How much time did past Adam waste?” — turns out, not that much. And this is for an Excel-based task, where you would think AI tools have an edge:

“What is hard is working with fragmented, incomplete, inconsistent datasets and coming up with clever methodology to tackle genuinely new research questions. And I’m yet to see evidence that common agents are about to takeover in this space. Even if I really do wish they could have saved me all that time a decade ago.”

I similarly have tried various AI tools over the years to see if I could really short-circuit one of the tasks that qual researchers most frequently outsource to the rare research assistant who may come along on a grant or through a co-author:

The structured literature analysis

I have a particular set of articles tightly clustered around an issue, fewer than 50 in number, from which I want to extract very specific information. Originally, I tried Elicit, roundabout 2023. The results were disappointing, and the tool seemed to be set up for medical researchers or similar. Now, with Claude Cowork at the ready, I decided to tackle this again, even though I have already done all the work manually. So it seemed an optimal test along the lines of “how much time could past Stephie have saved?”

Again, not much, as the result returned some egregious errors, which led to a longer conversation with Claude about how it works. In summary, text extraction at volume remains a challenge for context windows, and when the information is not on the first few pages of long academic articles, Claude defaults to “inference” based on training data and known outputs by academic authors.

What I did learn is that my instructions and the memory file for Claude need to include explicit instructions to mark where inference was used and flag for human checking.

If I can get a human research assistant for this task, that would still be superior to Claude. (Sorry, Claude.)

The rare qual voice

Over at Unpublishable Papers, an anthropologist’s view on AI brings up some pretty key issues for any business and management scholar:

“But artificial intelligence has still not changed much about the time and effort that goes into theoretical labor. Theory is still expensive. …But theoretical labor was always the important part.”

Which perhaps sums up why most business and management scholars remain quiet (and smug), even though most research is, in fact, quantitative. But our field is apparently not as empirically driven as the many concerned political scientists and economists (who generally think of themselves as perhaps somewhat superior to the upstart business schools).

The other social sciences, perhaps, sometimes wonder:

“But if theoretical labor is the important part, why don’t we instead have a scientific world maniacally focused on the stakes above all else?

Well, newsflash, everyone, this is what we are maniacally focused on ABOVE ALL ELSE ALL THE TIME.

Not least at the top journals. Sure, there are plenty of low-hanging journals that take the other stuff. They were not particularly influential before. Some significantly expanded volume before the first AI tool was ever launched to make money from the shift to open access. In this ecosystem, the potential for AI to produce work to significantly shift the field remains limited.

Will AI's affordances topple the dominance of theory in business and management? Well, probably not, and for the first time in ages, I think this may be a good thing. If we are lucky, it may even broaden and change the definition of theory, though I am less sure about that.

The only real challenge now is reading smoothly written, well-presented academic prose that even occasionally features a short sentence for impact or distraction, but there is no “there” there.

Of course, being able to write in a specific fashion has long been a shorthand in the field for “quality” (otherwise known as having been trained at the right schools, which are US American or trying to be). But even that, LLMs do not always fully manage. Or, indeed, their users have failed to set up their system correctly because they themselves are unaware of these conventions. Or just very bad at using AI…

Academic Publishing

Now this is where the crunch of the debate is… Whenever I see someone in business and management vociferously complain on LinkedIn (and probably elsewhere that I am not) that they were just sent an AI-generated manuscript for peer review with hallucinated references, I feel:

1. Sorry for the editors, who don’t have the time to check at this level and who are given no support in dealing with an avalanche of AI-generated dross (and who are generally unpaid beyond an honorarium in our field).

2. Angry at the publishers, who make a lot of money, and push their homespun new publishing systems at us with their endless problems, just because they now want to make money from data as well, PLUS licensing OUR writing to AI-companies, and then completely fail to purchase other AI systems that could just scan incoming manuscripts for hallucinated references (yes these firms exist, see for example GroundedAI). OK, breathe…

3. Exasperated with colleagues reviewing these pieces and vocalising their discontent with the moral superiority common to academics. Not because they are annoyed with hallucinated references. But because they then feel they can spot every instance of AI-generated work. You cannot, OK? You can identify the incompetent users at best.

That’s the ground-level experience right now.

Economists, of course, like to take the high ground. They also, it turns out, make their successful paid (ok, probably the archives function), so if you want to read it for yourself, you will need the 7-day trial. I really liked Scott Cunningham’s post, though some aspects really made my eyes roll madly in their sockets.

The first one was this:

Clearly, there is no scarcity in potential output space. Economists may think so, but that reflects distinct disciplinary institutions that reinforce a potentially even more hierarchical journal structure than the one in business and management. Since nobody properly pays editors (though this varies by field), you can hire them just fine. Editors are dirt cheap. The constraints are how many more papers we actually want to publish and whether we can effectively expand quality control.

At a relevant meeting last week, there were some general statements that publishing 1,500 or indeed 2,000 papers per year is clearly not aligned with quality control. It’s a generous assessment; even with a large team, I’d think the boundary for any one journal would be lower. But Cunningham’s argument is about a range of journals, and, as a larger field, business and management has many more of them.

So the idea that there is a limited, not at all dynamic pool of slots being targeted by authors, AI-assisted or otherwise, seems fanciful.

I agreed more heartily with the challenge of human peer review.

So, is human peer review dead? Probably. Is that such a disaster? I totally agree with Scott Cunningham, and so do others like Dave Karpf (now over at Beehiv). Karpf goes further, arguing it is the eulogy of the social science paper. By and large, his argument amounts to Goodhart’s law: we need to consider whether we are measuring the right thing for tenure, promotion, appointment, etc.

“Peer review was already stressed to the breaking point. It DOES NOT SURVIVE when a young researcher can have Claude Code produce a lit review, gather data, conduct a regression analysis, and slap on a passable discussion and conclusion section. Of course we will be flooded by AI-written/researcher-lightly-reviewed articles. Of course peer reviewers will either opt out of the (voluntary, thankless) labor of offering genuine feedback, or will have Claudebot heavily “assist” them in reviewing.

And this is a serious problem for Hiring Committees and Promotion & Tenure Committees. Universities are slow, lumbering bureaucracies. This is an appropriate time for them to freak out and start adjusting to the “death of the journal article.” They’re measuring the wrong thing. They will have to start measuring something else.

That brings me to my second point, though: good riddance!” (Dave Karpf)

What he does not provide is a blueprint for an alternative system. It just turns into another “woe is us in political science, the job market is so bad”. I am sympathetic, but you know? So what?

The economists seem hell-bent on raising submission fees even more as a deterrent, with little consideration for the well-known problems with that approach. Also, what about the rest of us, where submission fees are not accepted? And frankly, if a fee-charging journal would ask me to review for them FOR FREE(!), I would tell them where ot stick it.

So, we are all heading headlong into the academic interregnum:

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. (Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, c. 1930)

As far as monsters go, I quite like Claude Opus. And you know what I do now when I read something I am fairly sure is mostly AI-generated, with little to no human academic input?

Sorry, this last bit is paid subscribers only ;-) A bit of a personal comment and a “rattle bag” of some great readings out there!

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This is your latest update from the BBC WAC Campaign.

We have published our submission to the open consultation on the BBC Charter Review, which closes tomorrow. Thank you to the many signatories who helped in its drafting.

You can read it here.

It is a robust argument for WAC’s ‘new model’ to be reversed. It also serves as a detailed and fully referenced account of the engagement we have had with the BBC over the past year. For the vast majority of you this will be new information and we encourage you to read it in order to see quite how intransigent the Corporation has been when it comes to answering questions and taking on suggestions.

This submission has been shared with the most senior members of BBC staff, including the Board of Governors, the Chair, the outgoing and interim Director-Generals, the Operations Committee that signed off the new policy, as well as the archives team who have devised and administered. Also in receipt of a copy are Parliamentarians, Ofcom and members of the press.

Our recommendations are as follows:

• Strengthen the language of Public Purpose 2 to compel the BBC to reinstate independent and exploratory research through “on request” vetting of papers.

• Clarify section 69 of the current Framework Agreement so that WAC itself is strengthened, and access is brought up to industry standards - starting with an online catalogue.

• Increase the status of WAC through promotion of its services, so that it is properly valued as a crown jewel in the UK research sphere.

• Form a constituted working group for meaningful collaboration between the BBC and users to ensure the relevance and profile of WAC into the future - both for general audiences and the research community.

• Ensure greater transparency on future service changes, specifically WAC but also other archive services, in a way that provides timelines and does not destroy overnight research projects and commissioned work.

• Recalculate the costs and benefits of the current policy, taking into account the losses to the public rather than to the BBC’s corporate identity.

• Look at revenue solutions, including working with outside bodies, jointly seeking research funding, and increasing the charges for the Production Paperwork Service.

The Observer wrote up a new piece on the campaign in light of FOI emails that were finally released to us by the BBC in January. This access was only granted after appeal. The story is paywalled but you can read a mirror of the online version here. For those of you on Bluesky, we go into a little more depth about the FOI findings in this thread. Please read and share.

As ever, we are happy to hear from you if you need advice on using WAC during these challenging times.

With best wishes

Ian Greaves, Dr Kate Murphy and Professor John Wyver

If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, you can do so here.

And in light of how widely (and fiercely) debated this topic became at the start of March, this Friday's post is free to read, because I think this has been quite a lopsided debate.

Lopsided because it has been dominated by the quants, who are (perhaps predictably?) seeing that their methodological skills are more substitutable than they realised.

Also lopsided because the social science debate has been dominated by political scientists and economists. That one had me a little surprised — where are all the other social scientists? Especially business and management?

AI will take all your jobs

The frenzied debate is, of course, easiest to understand as part of the wider debate around whether we humans and our means of survival, otherwise known as jobs/employment, are at stake. As Richard Elsom, aka the AI Archivist, pointed out on LinkedIn, it is mostly people who do not do our jobs and know nothing about them who are busy telling everyone that they will soon be obsolete.

The FT’s AI Shift newsletter regularly digs into claims about AI-induced job-maggedon, and its two authors have currently settled on:

1. Economic data shows that job losses are not due to AI, because you would expect the productivity of the remaining workers to increase — guess what, that is not happening.

   1. There is one caveat to this: Software and Apps have been shipping at a noticeably higher rate since 2025. So the Claude Code effect is real. But by now, you have probably heard about the Jevons Paradox: greater efficiency of a resource leads to greater usage or consumption. So this may not even spell doom to coders. (Also, Google “demand elasticity” and look smart in the next AI debate.)

2. Most papers examining “at-risk” occupations operate on the principle of breaking jobs down into discrete tasks and tracking whether an AI can perform them. But, for the most part, our jobs are not bundles of discrete tasks. Sorry, but simple analytics only get you so far. Also, here is a neat Spider diagram by the FT that will either totally reassure you or give you the willies, depending on what your general inclination is anyway:

   

3. As a historian, you may note many a tortured analogy with past technological revolutions. Electrification and the introduction of spreadsheet software are popular — see the AI as Normal Technology and a previous post here. But the prize for best recent historical analogy certainly goes to David Oks’ elaboration of bank tellers — ATMs — the iPhone. (Worth a read! Click the image below for the full post.)

So, this is a short summary of the general moral panic. But it is so much more entertaining when the argument erupts about your own job.

AI will write your social science papers for you

You may know the post that kicked off the Big Debate. But I want to plug the FT’s AI Shift newsletter again, which discussed how good AI has become at doing quantitative social science analysis. Journalist John Burn-Murdoch reflected that, now that gruntwork can be done by AI, more clever people may be able to run more analysis more quickly, who previously maybe did not have the skills to use R or Python or the time to clean the data. And, of course, then John and Sarah O’Connor discussed the concomitant “AI brain fry”, the exhaustion you get from the speed with which AI solves your problems as your work intensifies.

But, you know, other people…

And then the Substack post that riled most of Bluesky (apparently, how would I know?) appeared:

Kustov IS a social scientist, so this set the cat among the pigeons. And not just with the title and the graphics, but also with a post hoc disclosure that the first post was written by AI… (based on his social media posts).

It’s a good piece, and it has a Part 2 follow-up. Part 1 made one really outrageous claim:

AI can already do social science research better than most professors.

Elsewhere, probably in the Notes which I cannot currently find, he hedged that this refers to the average and points to some of our favourite high-volume/low-standard “academic” publishers. A bit disingenuous, but the reality is that a few years as an editor makes you somewhat disillusioned with academic standards (by which I mean me, though maybe also Kustov).

In part 1, Kustov opines that he will no longer plan for a research assistant in his future workflows. (Ah, our US colleagues… research assistants, what are those?) His excitement for agents also highlights that he is part of a tradition in which workflows can be easily described and outsourced — classically, this is more the case for quantitative researchers.

Overall, Part 2 is perhaps the more thought-provoking piece, which interestingly puts forward a number of points worth discussing:

• “AI exposes what’s already broken in academia and beyond” — honestly, hard to argue with, especially around publishing.

• “Qualitative research and novel data collection will increase in relative value” — let’s all rejoice!

• The “jagged frontier” is real - but it’s also user skill and the tendency of critics to criticise old outmoded models and to be thoroughly unaware of how good the frontier models are.

Especially the last point is noticeable when it comes to the AI doomers in our field, I am afraid to say.

But, what left me somewhat disappointed with the debate was that while there is much debate of what is broken in academia, specifically in academic publishing (a subject I can wax angrily about at all times), and some useful pointers on jaggedness that are real, very little of this really seems to reflect qualitative researchers concerns, or the realities of business and management research.

So let’s look at some of these hotly contested issues from the perspective of a “qual” researcher in business and management.

What are the real bottlenecks in business research?

On reflection, most people would say it is not about producing more papers. Yet many arguments about AI replacing social scientists focus on its ability to produce papers more quickly, including the underlying analysis and the literature review.

Literature review papers are notoriously difficult to publish, by the way, and this will likely get worse now.

In business and management as a field, I would argue, you can publish everything you want, as there are so many journals, so many of them unranked, some questionable, and, of course, you have the predatory ones. And then you can publish anything on SSRN or MPRA, so publishing per se is not a meaningful bottleneck.

But we all know that this is not the game

The game has always been an institutional one: getting into the right journals (the right journals differ by institution type and country, though we all agree more or less on the elite).

This feeds into tenure, probationary review, promotion, or indeed, into avoiding redundancy.

So this means you need a) the cultural knowledge to know the journals, and this is increasingly codified — more on that in a future blog; b) the harder to obtain cultural knowledge and social capital that defines academic communities and what journals (editors & reviewers) want. This type of academic politics may be distasteful when we consider the pervasive gatekeeping behaviour in academia, but let me get back to that in part 2…

What’s your view on the emerging big AI debate? Leave a comment below.

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Regulating Beauty: The Licensing of Barbers and Beauticians in Alabama and the Nation, Tanner Corley, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.14

The Other Container Revolution: How Businesses Influenced Environmental Politics and Thus the Recycling of Beverage Containers, Louise Karlskov Skyggebjerg, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.16

The False Start: British Electrification, 1880–1888, William Kennedy; Robert Delargy, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.15

Emancipation and the Business of Compensation in the Cape Colony, Kate Ekama, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10077

Stavert, Zigomala & Co.: A Transnational History of the Anglo-Cuban Textile Trade During 1860s–1914, Victoria de Lorenzo Alcantara, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10071

Better than No Beer at All: Legal Roles for 3.2 Beer in the Post-Prohibition Era United States, Jason E. Taylor; Eline Poelmans, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10076

Japanese Postwar Success: The Impact of Moral Re-Armament, Eric B. Dent; Stephanie L. Torrico; Craig Randall, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10080

The Origins of “Big Tobacco” Cigarette Manufacturing and the Prevalence of Smoking in Colonial Cyprus, 1920–1960, Andrekos Varnava, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10081

Between State Control and Banking Power: Spanish Banking Supervision Under Franco (1940–1975), Joaquim Cuevas; Maria A. Pons, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10083

Global Capitalist Assemblages: A Historiographical Appraisal of Multinational Enterprise in the Global South, Kristoffer Edelgaard Christensen; Søren Ivarsson, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10094

Under the Eagle’s Wings: The Coca-Cola Company’s Trademark Protection and Its Dilemmas in China (1930–1949), Zejun Wang, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10096

Reinterpreting Medical Innovation: The Social Adoption of Automated Multiphasic Health Testing and Services in Japan, 1937–2023, Ken Sakai; Yuki Tsuboyama; Masatoshi Fujiwara, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10082

Roundtable Review, Alexander J. Field; Brian R. Cheffins; Laura Phillips-Sawyer; Naomi R. Lamoreaux; Daniel M.G. Raff, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10

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Regulating Beauty: The Licensing of Barbers and Beauticians in Alabama and the Nation – ERRATUM, Tanner Corley, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2025.10075

Join us for our next MBH webinar on publishing historical research in top journals in management and business history in June!

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!

Chris Hartwell on Business under Dictatorship

1 June 2026, 12.00-13:30 British Standard Time

Online, register here.

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.

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You are warmly invited to the next AQR seminar:

Speaker: Professor Corinne Post, the Fred J. Springer Endowed Chair in Business Leadership and Professor of Management at the Villanova School of Business
Topic: How a Literature Review Can Change the Scholarly Conversation

When: Wednesday 18 March, 17:00 to 18:30 UK time
Location: Online (contact Maxim for the details)

We will have the great pleasure of hosting Professor Corinne Post, who will present her multi-faceted approach to developing theoretical contribution in review articles, published in the leading Journal of Management Studies:

Post, C., Sarala, R., Gatrell, C. and Prescott, J. E. (2020). Advancing theory with review articles. Journal of Management Studies, 57(2), 351 to 376.

Many of us have read this paper, which has informed our thinking and analysis. As the review of the literature occupies a central place in the research, we believe this is an exceptional opportunity for us, particularly for early career researchers, to have their questions addressed by a leading scholar.

To support a focused discussion, we kindly ask you to:

1. Read the attached paper in advance of the seminar.

2. If you have any questions, please send us your questions in advance in writing.

Prof. Corinne Post is the Fred J. Springer Endowed Chair in Business Leadership and Professor of Management at the Villanova School of Business. Her research examines when and how diversity enables or impedes group and organizational performance and how social identity affects career trajectories. Prof. Post’s work is published in leading academic journals including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and Journal of Applied Psychology. Her research has been discussed in places such as the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. In 2022 her influence on the field of diversity, equity and inclusion studies was recognized by the Academy of Management with the Sage Award for scholarly contributions. In 2025, she was ranked as among the World’s Top 2% Scientists.

The AQR Seminar Series is an initiative of the Collaborative Solutions for Social Problems Lab at Kent Business School, led by Dr M. May Seitanidi. The series brings together early, mid and senior career researchers interested in qualitative research in the social sciences to exchange knowledge and deepen understanding of qualitative methodology in both theory and practice.

We look forward to welcoming you.

Kind regards,

Maxim Potepkin

AQR Seminar Series Coordinator

Kent Business School