Submit your papers to the EGOS History Sub-theme 2025!
EGOS 2025 in Athens, 3-5 July
Sub-theme 41: Tracing the Past: Historical Methods for Studying Entrepreneurship, Imagination, and Innovation
https://www.egos.org/2025_Athens/SUB-THEMES_Call-for-Papers
Convenors:
Elena Giovannoni
University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Christina Lubinski
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Adam J. Nix
University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Call for Papers
Exploring creativity that goes a long way requires an explicit engagement with temporality and the links between past, present, and future. Historical research has long offered a variety of methods and conceptual tools for researching creative works and organizations, and their impact on society (Bucheli & Wadhwani, 2014; Decker et al., 2023). These methods rely upon a rich variety of sources, ranging from archival documents, including textual, numerical, visual, and digital accounts (Clark & Rowlinson, 2004; Kipping et al., 2014; Nix & Decker, 2023), to recordings, memories, spatial traces, and material and embodied practices (Lipartito, 2014; Platts, 2023). By providing an inventory of traces that not only allow us to reconstruct the past but also inspires theoretical imagination, such sources enhance our understanding of diverse social phenomena and the lived experience of historical actors (see, e.g., Kostera, 2020). Indeed, recent research on historical imagination (Heller & Rowlinson, 2020), entrepreneurial imagination (Ram et al., Forthcoming), microhistory (Hargadon & Wadhwani, 2023), rhetorical history (Lubinski, 2023; Suddaby et al., 2023), and memory studies (Foroughi et al., 2020) have all successfully drawn on a variety of spatial, material, sensory, visual or oral sources to elaborate these themes. The traces of the past are an ideal vantage point from which to better understand the thoughts, imagination, perceptions, moral search, and experiences that make up the craft of creative composition within and beyond organizations.
Nevertheless, there is significant scope to delve further into the aspirations, ambitions, creative thinking, morality, and the lived experience surrounding how creativity unfolds and eventually becomes innovation. For example, insights here could contribute to the history of ideas, science and technology (Juma, 2016), social movements (see, e.g., Crossley, 2003), new practices (see, e.g., Quattrone, 2009 on the spread of accounting, and the power of visual images, imagination, and memory), or objects (see, e.g., Daston & Galison, 1992 on photography). Additionally, the past allows appreciation of the darker sides of creative and innovative processes; for instance, when pushing the boundaries of entrepreneurial innovation crosses the line into wrongdoing (Nix, Decker, & Wolf, 2021), when ‘creative’ accounting or other professional practices undermine public trust and fiduciary duties (Gabbioneta et al., 2019), or when creative processes apparently fail, are left incomplete or ambiguous, but nevertheless continue to inspire imagination (Giovannoni & Quattrone, 2018). This agenda calls for new or adjusted approaches to historical sources and methods, innovating the way in which scholars look for the traces of the past to contribute to the understanding of creativity processes and phenomena. Far from being passive recollections of facts, sources are themselves part of the social texture that underpins past phenomena, explaining their dynamism and how they are, or can be, projected into long-standing innovation.
This sub-theme will provide a space for organization scholars interested in innovating their research methods through historical approaches. Our aim is to discuss traditional and innovative ways of looking into the rich variety of historical sources, their nature, structures, fluidity, their absences and voids, as well as their material, spatial, sensory, and social properties that allow scholars to explore the historical roots of phenomena, or newly emerging phenomena, in nuanced ways. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and methodological studies addressing questions including but not limited to:
- What are the challenges and opportunities for nuanced historical research in organization studies? How can we enrich our use of sources through cross-disciplinary approaches?
- What sources can we draw upon to research the history of creative thought, ideas, movements, disruptive or revolutionary innovations, and emerging practices? How do historical approaches help us rethink creativity and imagination but also moral and ethical quests that underpin these innovations?
- What are the sensory, spatial, material, and visual properties of sources? How are they crafted and how do they relate to the phenomena that they trace?
- How can we connect and combine different types of historical sources and draw on their relations and texture? How can the different nature and features of historical sources help us innovate conventional methodological approaches?
- How can we study the lived and felt experiences of phenomena, including their ambiguity and gaps, through historical research?
- What can the past tell us about the dark side of innovation and creativity and the relationship such phenomena have with wrongdoing in an organizational or entrepreneurial context?
- What can ‘unusual’ historical sources - such as digital records and/or those artefacts not typically captured by traditional archival processes and institutions – bring to our understanding of entrepreneurship, imagination, and innovation?
We are interested in submissions from different disciplinary perspectives and methodological traditions that directly address or speak to the points above, exploring challenges and opportunities for innovative approaches in using and tracing the past as a way to innovate theory, methods and practices for researching organizations and organizing.
References
Bucheli, M., & Wadhwani, D. R. (Eds.) (2014): Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, P., & Rowlinson, M. (2004): “The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an ‘Historic Turn’?”. Business History, 46(3), 331-352.
Crossley, N. (2003): “Even Newer Social Movements? Anti-Corporate Protests, Capitalist Crises and the Remoralization of Society”. Organization, 10(2), 287-305.
Daston, L., & Galison, P. (1992): “The Image of Objectivity”. Representations, (40), 81-128.
Decker, S., Foster, W., & Giovannoni, E. (Eds.) (2023): Handbook of Historical Methods for Management. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Foroughi, H., Coraiola, D. M., Rintamäki, J., Mena, S., & Foster, W. M. (2020): “Organizational Memory Studies”. Organization Studies, 41(12), 1725-1748.
Gabbioneta, C., Faulconbridge, J. R., Currie, G., Dinovitzer, R., & Muzio, D. (2019): “Inserting Professionals and Professional Organizations in Studies of Wrongdoing: The Nature, Antecedents and Consequences of Professional Misconduct”. Human Relations, 72(11), 1707-1725.
Giovannoni, E., & Quattrone, P. (2018): “The materiality of absence. Organizing and the case of the incomplete cathedral”. Organization studies, 39(7), 849-871.
Hargadon, A. B., & Wadhwani, R. D. (2023): “Theorizing with Microhistory”. Academy of Management Review, 48(4), 681-696.
Heller, M., & Rowlinson, M. (2020): “The British House Magazine 1945 to 2015: The Creation of Family, Organisation and Markets”. Business History, 62(6), 1002-1026.
Juma, C. (2016): Innovation and its enemies: why people resist new technologies (First edition. ed.). New York, NY: Oxford 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: History, Theory, Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 305-329.
Kostera, M. (2020): The Imagined Organization: Spaces, Dreams and Places. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Lipartito, K. J. (2014): “Historical Sources and Data”. In M. Bucheli & R. D. Wadhwani (Eds.), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 284-304.
Lubinski, C. (2023): “Rhetorical History: Giving Meaning to the Past in Past and Present”. In S. Decker, W. Foster, & E. Giovannoni (Eds.), Handbook of Historical Methods for Management. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 35-45.
Nix, A., & Decker, S. (2023): “Using Digital Sources: The Future of Business History?”. Business History, 65(6), 1048-1071.
Nix, A., Decker, S., & Wolf, C. (2021): “Enron and the California Energy Crisis: The Role of Networks in Enabling Organizational Corruption”. Business History Review, 95(4), 765-802.
Platts, H. (2023): “Multisensory Approaches to Researching the Past: Insights from History and Archaeology”. In S. Decker, W. Foster, & E. Giovannoni (Eds.), Handbook of Historical Methods for Management. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 173-187.
Quattrone, P. (2009): “Books to be Practiced: Memory, the Power of the Visual, and the Success of Accounting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(1), 85-118.
Ram, H., Giacomin, V., & Wakslak, C. (Forthcoming). Entrepreneurial Imagination: Insights from Construal Level Theory for Historical Entrepreneurship. Business History. doi:10.1080/00076791.2022.2149737
Suddaby, R., Israelsen, T., Bastien, F., Saylors, R., & Coraiola, D. (2023): “Rhetorical History as Institutional Work”. Journal of Management Studies, 60(1), 242-278.
Elena Giovannoni is Professor of Accounting at the Department of Accounting, Birmingham Business School, United Kingdom. She was the founder and former co-director of CHRONOS (Critical and Historical Research on Organization and Society) research centre. Her work bridges critical and historical perspectives and methods for researching accounting, calculative practices and organizing, with a particular interest on visual, material, and spatial practices and methods. She has published her research in leading accounting journals – among others, ‘Human Relations’ and ‘Organization Studies’ –, and she has co-edited a handbook on historical research methods for management.
Christina Lubinski is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Business History at the Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. She is the principal investigator of the interdisciplinary research project “Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society”, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, supporting a research environment of ten PhD students and Post-docs from history, entrepreneurship, political sciences, law, and sociology.
Adam J. Nix is a Lecturer in Responsible Business at the Department of Management, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. His research employs historical approaches to management and organization studies, with a particular interest in understanding misconduct, corruption, and failure as organizational issues. Adam’s prior work has explored entrepreneurial failure in the dot.com era, market manipulation in deregulated energy markets, and the use of email as a source of historical insight into organizations.