Presented at the Academy of Management (2014).

1. The Historic Turn in Five Moves
Albert J. Mills
Saint Mary’s University
http://sociologyofmanagementknowledge.c
om

2. 5 Cents Worh
• 1. The Historic Re-turn?
• 2. Can OMT be Historical?
• 3. Is CMS Historical?
• 4. Is There a Point of Fusion between CMS-
OMT-History?
• 5. Paradigmatic Fallacy or Folly?

3. 1c. The Historic Turn or Return?
• Claude George-Daniel Wren-Chuck Wrege-
Alfred Chandler-various historical accounts of
the field within Management textbooks, etc.
• The call for the historic turn is not a call for a
re-turn but infact a move away from factualist
account of the past.

4. 2c Can OMT be Historical?
• Plenty of examples of embedded notions of the
past that need to be surfaced - path dependency
theory, new institutional theory, etc.
• What happens when we theorize them? We
either lose sight of critical debates around what
constitutes the `past’ and `history’ or we
obfuscate the mismatch between methodological
accounts of organizing and their histories.

5. 3c [Where] Is CMS historical?
• In the sense that we mean consciously aware
of the past there are varying traditions , incl.
Marxism, critical realism, feminist
materialism, feminist/poststructuralism, etc.
• Little evidence in past two decades of
engagement with/reflection on the past-
history e.g., ahistorical CDA

6. 4c Is There a Point of Fusion between
CMS-History-OMT?
• Yes and No
• Ideas of history/past are not detached from
episto-ontological positions that are reconcilable
through methodological standpoints. No one is
arguing for the fusion of factualist history with
poststructuralist OMT; nor scientifisitic histories
with scientifistics theories of organization.
• So fusion takes place at the level of focus
(awareness of the issues of past/history) OR at
the methodological level, e.g., new historicism
and poststructuralist OMT

7. 5c Paradigmatic Fallacy or Folly?
• The various calls for/celebrations of the historic
turn in OMT only works is you ignore the
underlying methodological problems of fusing a
cow with a horse.
• In ANTi-History terms, we need to peak behind
the scenes to see what actors engaged in a
process of enrolling other actors to the idea of
history, only to obfuscate the translation process
which sees the past/history issue as only being
resolvable through one (critical) methodological
position or other.

8. Special Issue of M&OH/ASB 2015
• Re-visiting the Historic Turn 10 years later:
Current Debates in Management and
Organizational History
-Albert J. Mills-Roy Suddaby-Bill Foster-Gabie
Durepos (Deadline: 31/March/2015)
http://sociologyofmanagementknowledge.com
http://asb.acadiau.ca/2014conference/index.php