Presented at the Academy of Management 2014

1. Rethinking History:
An ANTi-History Perspective
Albert J. Mills
Saint Mary’s University

2. Learning from History
• “Those who fail to learn from history are
doomed to repeat it” – Winston Churchill
• `Those who fail to learn from the ontological
status of history are doomed to reproduce its
myths’ – Weatherbee, Durepos, Mills & Helms
Mills 2012.

3. Self Reflections on the Past
• Capitalism threatened humanity – from
Vietnam to Cuba to Chile
• Marxism – offered hope for human kind –
with science, (dialectical) materialism,
evidence of global revolutionary struggle and,
above all, history
• Historical materialism provided a scientific
glimpse into the future based on an unfolding
past of class struggle.

4. Self Reflections on the Past
• Marxism in practice came with its nightmares
as well as its visions – Stalinism, State
Socialism, Show Trials, etc. All justified in the
name of history.
• Capitalism also had history as truth on its side
– as McCarthyism persecuted people for their
Un-American attitudes.
• History, it seems, can be bad for you!

5. The Cold War as Intellectual Context
• It has been argued that (today’s) management
and organization studies (MOS) – and supporting
history were shaped by the aftermath of WWII
and the Cold War era (Kelley, Mills & Cooke,
2006). Producing a field that is dominated by
underlying Western philosophies (specifically US),
that are managerialist, realist, male centred,
business oriented, etc. In many ways imbued
with the historical values of American
exeptionalism and liberal progressivism.

6. Towards the call for the `Historic Turn’
• The development of the field has over the
years been supported by engagement with
history (e.g., Urwick, 1938, 1963; Chandler,
1977, 1979), the production of histories (e.g.,
George, 1968, 1972; Wren, 1972, 1979), and
the establishment of associated scholarly
communities (e.g., the establishment of the
MH Division of the AoM in the early 1970s).

7. The Historic Re-Turn
• Yet, as early as 1979 Burrell & Morgan were
characterizing the field as ahistorical.
• Call for an `historic turn’ in MOS (Kieser, 1994;
Booth & Rowlinson, 2006) address the overly
ahistorical character of the field today (Burrell &
Morgan, 1979) - various critiques of MOS for
ignoring context, historical development,
presentism, scientifism, universalism, and
philosophies of history and the methods of
historiography.

8. The Historic Re-Turn
• The call for the historic turn was in part a call
for attention to the role of the past in MOS; in
part a call for a reintegration of management
theory/history with the humanities and the
social sciences (Kieser, 1994); and in part an
alignment with the narrative and discursive
turns in MOS and greater consideration of the
role of critical organizational history (Booth &
Rowlinson, 2006).

9. Approaches to History in MOS
Factual (Wren): the past consists of a number of
events that can help us make sense of the
present and the future. We can make cognitive
decisions based on history.
Contextual (Kieser): the past is embedded in a
number of contextual factors that influence how
we experience/make sense of things in the
present.

10. Approaches to History in MOS
• Methodological (Booth & Rowlinson): a
focus on the methodological framing of the
past can help us to understand the
representation of theories of organization.
• Epistemic (Durepos & Mills): a focus on
how history is produced can help us to
understand the production of
(organizational) knowledge.

11. Five Insights for Critical Historiography

12. The past-as-history
• The Past in ontologically unobtainable and
can only be re-presented by history
(Munslow, 2010).
• `the past-as-history’ is where
representations of the past are legitimized
as history (because they are of the past)
and the past becomes real or true
because it is viewed through history.

13. Conflation and Discourse
• Performance of the past-as-history (and its
legitimizing role) (Jenkins, 2003) can be
viewed as discursive – a set of powerful
practices legitimized through powerful ideas
constituted as history.

14. History as Discourse
• History is arguably a powerful discourse in
itself – a means of arbitrating knowledge of
the past as well as, in its performance of
various aspects of `the past’ (i.e., histories)
stands as specific knowledge of what
happened before now.
• As such the past and history obfuscate their
discursive roots

15. Knowledge of the Past-History as
Actor-network effects
• The question is not so much what is a true
account of the past so how as how such
(potentially multiple) accounts are produced.
• Discursive behaviour and thought processes are
arguably linked to powerful practices that
generate knowledge/power (Foucault, 1979).
• This suggests that for the politics of liberation we
need to unmask than simply debate History,
revealing the socio-politics of its production.

16. Critical approaches and History
• Struggle, change and identities rely on history
and reference to what happened in the past.
• How do we proceed if we have no reference
points between the past and the present?
• How do we develop and relay stories of
oppression and change?
• At the very least how do we deal with
ahistorical accounts of managing and
organizing?

17. Critical approaches and History
• From an ANTi-History perspective we still have
our stories, narrative and tales. History is at best
a recounting and analysis of those accounts. They
are not real in the sense that they capture the
essence of what actually happened. They are not
false because they `reveal’ the stories that
people live by. The stories should not be ignored
in accounts of organizational events nor in
struggles against oppression. Finally, they should
not be used as arbiters of truth that become new
forms of oppression.