This document discusses the importance of history for management and organizational studies (MOS) and reflects on the production of history. It outlines four paradigms for studying organizational history: factual, contextual, archaeo-genealogical, and anti-history. It also discusses lessons from the "historic turn" in calling for more examination of how knowledge is produced and questioning the taken-for-granted nature of History. Ongoing research focuses on reassembling Canadian management knowledge and examining the role of history in reproducing gender relations.

1. Sustaining `Canada:’
Management Theory, History and
`Canadian Sensibilities.’
Albert J. Mills
Sobey School of Business
Saint Mary’s University

2. The Importance of History for
Management and Organizational
Studies (MOS)
Albert J. Mills
Sobey School of Business
Saint Mary’s University

3. Reflections from the Canadian
Sociology of Management
Knowledge Network
• Gabie Durepos (StFx)
• Trish Genoe McLaren (WLU)
• Jean Helms Mills (SMU)
• Amy Thurlow (MSVU)
• Terry Weatherbee (Acadia U)
• Kristene Coller (U Lethbridge)

4. Links to Previous Talk
 Human ecology (impact of social
construction of human being and human
divisions)
 The production of knowledge (how do we
`know’ certain things and how can we
change what we know).

5. Which Albert Mills?
 Read Mills 2014

6. 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.

7. Purpose of the Talk
 Reflections on:
- Importance of history for MOS
- Problematic of history
- Production of history
- Consequences of history
 Focus on two issues of engagement –
gender and Canadian history

8. Lessons from Stephen Harper
 History is important
 History is problematic
 History is (socio)political
 History has profound consequences

9. History as Important (sic)
For Stephen Harper, History is an important element in
the sustainability of Canada as a proud and important
nation:
“I was heartened to learn of this [National Capital
History Day] innovative celebration of Canadian history.
. . [as] a valuable forum for celebrating the rich heritage
that links our captivating past to a vibrant future.” Prime
Minister Stephen Harper, April, 29, 2014

10. History as Problematic
 In his quest for history projects, like all
history projects, Mr. Harper faced issues of
what to focus on and where to begin . . . .

11. History as Problematic!!

12. History as (Socio-Politics)
 `The Canadian Museum of Civilization, the country's largest
museum, will be rebranded as the Canadian Museum of
History to reflect a focus on the country's social and political
history’ - Heritage Minister James Moore
 The controversy over the Museum of Civilization
reveals not simply the big `P’ politics of history-
making but the socio-politics of
determining what counts as history.

13. The Consequences of History
 In accounts of the past, the choices we make
in what and who to focus on can have
profound consequences. For example, an
over focus on great battles and generals can
serve to privilege the military, masculinity
and colonial powers while marginalizing
women, femininity, indigenous peoples, and
the working class people who helped to build
Canada

14. History and MOS?
 What can possibly go wrong . . . .?

15. The Consequences of historical
production in MOS
 Field definition that overly draws on private
and corporate sector companies, to the
exclusion of crown/state corporations,
cooperatives, communes (Foster et al.,
2014)
 Absence of context in which management
histories are `written’ (e.g., impact of the
Cold War – Cooke et al, 2006)

16. The Consequences of historical
production in MOS
 Selected `founding fathers’ (e.g., Taylor v
Emerson; Dennison V. Mayo – Muldoon,
2012); The retrospective positioning of
Weber (Weatherbee at al 2014); `writing in’
of the Human Relations school; ignoring the
role of Mary Parker Follett; privileging
US/Eurocentric theoretical positions over
voices of `the South’ (Colado, 2010).

17. The Consequences of historical
production in MOS
 Absence of histories of management theory
development in Canada (Austin, 2000; Boothman,
2000). Writing out or neglect?
 Ignoring cultural differences in
`reading’/presenting management history
(McQuarrie 2005)
 Absence of histories of `Canadian’ contributions
to management theory development.

18. History and MOS
 Over much of the past two decades there
have been various calls for an historic turn in
Management & Organization Studies.
 Daniel Wren (USA)
 Barbara Austin (Canada)
 Barry Boothman (Canada)
 Alfred Kieser (Germany)
 Charles Booth and Mick Rowlinson (UK)
 Gabie Durepos & Albert J, Mills (Canada)

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. Overall argument for the historic
turn – the importance of history
 Factual: “Everything about the management
discipline . . . comes from its inherited past. . . .
History may not repeat itself, but it does provide a
baseline for evaluating the significance of new
theories and techniques, as well as appreciating the
evolution of management thought across time and
the contribution of our discipline’s leading thinkers”
(Wren & Bedeian, 2009, p.xxv).
 NOTE: Questions the ahistorical character of
MOS

22. Overall argument for the historic
turn – the importance of history
Contextual: To understand contemporary institutions it
important to know something of their historical
development (Kieser, 1994: 609), by
reducing the ideological biases that are embedded
in “current `fashionable’ trends in [MOS]” (p.610):
“interpret[ing] existing organizational structures not
as determined by [objective] laws but as the result of
decisions in past choice opportunities,”(p.611);

23. Overall argument for the historic
turn – the importance of history
subjecting theories of organizational change to a
more radical test than they have to pass when
merely being confronted with data on short-run
changes” (p.612).
NOTE: questions the decontextualized character of MOS

24. Overall argument for the historic
turn – the importance of history
 Methodological: diverse historical methods help to
reveal the relationship between understandings of
the past and extant understandings of organization -
challenging the universalist, presentist, and
scientifistic dominance in MOS.
NOTE: Questions the dominance of positivist
methodological approaches of MOS and MOH.

25. Overall argument for the historic
turn – the importance of history
 Epistemic: a focus on the role of History and
its production as `knowledge of the past’
helps to reveal the processes of knowledge
production within MOS
 NOTE: questions the ontological status of
knowledge in (History) and MOS

26. The problem with history and the
past.
 Ontological
 Epistemological
 Methodological
 Paradigmatic differences

27. Ontological
 Questions about the ontological character of the past and its
relationship to history.
 Factual approach: take a realist view of the past;
 Contextual approach: argues that there is an important
element of interpretation in assembling and presenting
historical facts
 Methodological approach: argues that so-called facts and
their interpretation are mediated through different
methodologies
 Epistemic approach argue that the past is ontologically
dissonant from history and history is an outcome of a series of
relational associations.

28. Epistemological
 Questions about the relationship between the past
and history.
 Factual: views the past-as-history. What is past is
history and revealed through the relevant facts.
 Contextual: history is a representation of the past.
 Methodological: history as methodological
construction of the past
 Epistemic: history is an outcome of actor-network
productions of the past.

29. Methodological
 Questions about how to study the
relationship between the past and history.
 Much of what counts as historical analyses in business studies
– whether by non-historians or historians (including business
historians) – does not require the accompaniment of
methodological justification: at its best “the copious notes
detailing the location of sources in the archives are usually
seen as sufficient methodological justification in their own right”
(Booth & Rowlinson, 2006, p.9).
 History often perceived as “myopic fact-collecting without a
method” (Keiser,1994, p.612)

30. Methodological
 Factual: collecting historical facts through well established
objectivist methods. [Often not revealed in accounts].
 Contextual: developing histories through narrative analyses of
the established facts. [Sometimes revealed]
 Methodological: meta analyses of the relationship between
methods and the production of history. [Historical methods as
subject]
 Epistemic: tracing the production of various histories through
actor-networks.[`Self consciously’ methodological]

31. Four Paradigms of Organizational
History
The factual approach --aligned with positivism in the
argument that “if organization studies were to take
account of the facts revealed by history then a number
of erroneous assumptions would be undermined” (p.8).
From this framework history is viewed as “a repository
of facts which, so long as historians properly interpret
them, can conveniently confirm or refute preferred or
non-preferred theoretical positions in organization
studies” (Rowlinson, 2004, p.10).

32. Four Paradigms of Organizational
History
 The contextual approach -- focuses on the
role of narrative in the social construction of
historical accounts. Here the argument is
that history is not so much the skillfully
crafted recounting of real, or factual, events
from the past so much as a well crafted story
about the past that is constructed by the
historian through the careful use of narrative.

33. Exemplar: Hayden White
 1) the past consists of innumerable, disparate elements that, by
definition, cannot be brought back or reproduced;
 2) the historian make choices about which of many stories
(histories) to tell by selecting some elements of the past and
ignoring others.
 3) interpretation is compounded by the fact that he or she is
faced with `traces’ (documents, memories, etc) that are
themselves selected interpretations of the past;
 4) in constructing a history, much like the novelist, the historian
is constrained by a limited number of writing genres for telling a
story

34. White’s Narrative Genres
 Emplotment –
 Romance (e.g., heroic individual)
 Tragedy (e.g., influence of fate on events)
 Comedy (e.g., individuals as part of organic whole)
 Satire (e.g., a focus on chaos)
 Tropes
 metaphor (e.g., Machiavellian)
 metonymy (e.g.,a word for an attribute - `suits’)
 synecdoche (e.g., noun represents whole – hired hands)
 Irony (e.g.,reference to a meaning’s opposite)

35. Four Paradigms of Organizational
History
 The archaeo-genealogical approach – explores through
“language the sedimented evidence of the assumptions; the
values; the common sense through which a phenomenon (e.g.,
madness) could have one set of meanings in one era and a
contradictory set of meanings in another” (Jacques, 2010: 305);
examination of “the conditions under which the different ways
of interpreting and evaluating ourselves have come to exist”
(Poutanen & Kovalainen, 2010: 263).
 The purpose of the genealogical method is to analyze and
excavate the taken-for-granted” assumptions that define the
present.

36. Exemplar: Mills (2006)
Juncture: “a concurrence of events in time in
which a series of images, impressions, and
experiences come together, giving the
appearance of a coherent whole that influences
how an organization is understood” (Mills,
2010: 509).
[Related to Foucauldian notion of episteme and
Annales School’s mentalities.]

37. British Airways, Culture and
Gender
 #1. The development of an all male organization (1919-24);
 #2. The introduction and growth of female employment within
BA (1924-39);
 #3. The war years and the rapid expansion of female
employment (1940-45);
 #4 The consolidation and `normalization’ of female employment
(1946-1960);
 #5 The eroticization of female labour (1960-74);
 #6 The organization as the site of equity struggles (1974-81);
 #7 The development and consolidation of professionalized
female labour (1981-91);
 #8 The emergence of a new juncture focused on female
management and leadership (1991-). (Mills, 1994b).

38. Four Paradigms of Organizational
History
 ANTi-History – builds on SoK, Poststructuralist History, ANT
(Durpos & Mills, 2010)
 1. Focuses on the constitution of the past as an outcome of the
socio-politics of actor networks.
 2. Does not begin by assuming what it is that the researcher
wishes to explain or imposing a plot
 3.Maps the socio-past by following a series of socio-politics of
actor-networks, to understand how they construct their past.
 4. Privileges the voice of the actors over that of the historian
and privileges the empirical over the theoretical when
(re)assembling the traces of the socio-past.

39. Four Paradigms of Organizational
History
 5. Views actor-networks as materially heterogeneous
 6. History is viewed as an effect of the interest driven socio-
politics of actor-networks
 7. Sees ‘history’ as a punctuated actor or a black box
 8. Explores the conditions for the favourable dispersion of a
`punctuated history
 9. Acknowledges/exposes the potential instrumentality of
historical accounts
 10. Makes transparent the socio-political conditions of the
creation of history.
 (Based on Durepos, 2009; see also Mills & Durepos, 2010 &
Bryman et al, 2011)

40. Lessons from the Historic Turn
 History is important for a variety of reasons
 History is highly problematic
 Raising issues of ontology, epistemology,
and methodology
 Suggests we need to understand how
knowledge is produced
 Suggests we need to question the meta-
discoursive character of History/history

41. Lessons from the Historic Turn
 Need to explore issue of divergence and
fusion of history and MOS – linked through
knowledge production

42. On-Going and Future Research
 Reassembling Canadian Management
Knowledge: Dispersion, Equity, Identity and
History
(Coller et al., 2014; 2015; MacNeil, 2014,
McNally, 2014, McLaren & Mills, 2015;
Foster et al, 2014a, 2014b; Hartt, et al.,
2012).

43. On-Going and Future Research
 Examination of how historical accounts
develop and are used to re/produce
gendered relations (“tradition,” the past).
 The role of organizational history and
gendered relations in organizations (Hartt et
al 2010); history and intersectionality
(Weigand et al, 2014; Paludi et al, 2014)

44. On-Going and Future Research
 How management knowledge in Canada is
developed and disseminated and what are
the implications for gender, cultural and
national gaps in its production.
 Seeking to deconstruct the dominant US-
centric historical account to open up the
possibility of multiple historical accounts

45. On-Going and Future Research
 Seeking to deconstruct the meta-discursive
character of history that ultimately binds us to
problematic and legitimizing truth claims.
 Seeking to open space for debate about the
richness of histories as powerful storytelling
and sensemaking devices that are essential
to the sustenance of the human condition.