Mind the Gap(s) or Talking to other people (2)
Transport history and management & organizational history
Last week I gave a talk at Aston University for a workshop called Transport History: Past Perspectives, Future Policy. My title, Mind the Gap(s), was obviously a wordplay on the famous London Tube announcement, but also a nod to a recent co-authored work with Guting Shen and Adam Nix, which we called “Minding the Gaps”.
And the idea was to make the talk about two kinds of gaps at once: the first is the gaps you experience when you work in inter- or multidisciplinary fields, which describe the difficulties of moving between different epistemic communities. Last week’s post began by considering the need to make our research interesting to more than just our “home” epistemic community.
The second kind of gap is one I have worked on a lot: gaps in the archive, where the historical record is silent. At the Modern British Studies conference, many participants just considered gaps and silences as normal for historians, whether they are in physical archives or digital. That’s nice for the humanities folk, where muddling through passes as a method.
It plays less well with the more “scientist-ic” audiences: business and management, and also transport studies.
And this is kind of why I ended up at the workshop (which was actually very good). I am not a transport person. I use it, but I don’t research it. So when I was first invited, I wanted to have a conversation first, because I was kind of confused. What would I have to say to a transport studies group?
Turns out the concept of the meeting was to provide some knowledge and experience sharing from management & organizational history (or indeed historical organization studies), to transport historians seeking to engage more with transport studies. Because business historians reinvented themselves as MOH to establish a space in business and management. Transport historians, who are reasonably close to business historians, are largely aware of this move and have apparently been considering how it might translate into better engagement with transport studies.
So, what did I do? A very limited crash course in transport studies (more on the how below) and a bit of a consideration of what shape the gap between transport history and transport studies is compared to MOH and business and management. The argument I landed on was gaps. Explaining the unavoidable archival silences through an explicit methodological framework: historical triangulation.
Because you always need to explain to people not familiar with archives why the dataset is not as flawless as expected.
And coincidentally, we just published a piece with our wonderful doctoral student, Guting Shen, about how to do historical triangulation:
Decker, S., Nix, A. and Shen, G. (2025). Minding the gaps: Triangulation strategies for colonial and postcolonial archives. Business History. DOI
OK, it is about the historical records of department stores in Republican China, which we use as worked examples. But, as the discussions at the Modern British Studies conference showed in the previous week, gaps and silences really affect EVERYONE who works with archives. All sorts of reasons for this, more on that below.
So this may be a transport story on the surface, but the underlying problems will be familiar to anyone doing historical research in other fields, or, frankly, anyone working across disciplinary and epistemic boundaries.
Catch-up service:
Historical methods in organizational and business research: a practical guide (always free)
Are we entering a digital dark age? Or: Talking to other people (1) (archival silences, born-digital edition)
AI in peer review (less moral panic, more useful guidance)
