The title of this edited volume is slightly misleading, as its various contributions explore the potential for more historical analysis in organization studies rather than addressing issues associated with time and organizing. Hopefully this will not distract from the important achievement of this volume—important especially for business historians—in further expanding and integrating business history into management and organization studies. The various contributions, elegantly tied together by R. Daniel Wadhwani and Marcelo Bucheli in their substantial introduction (which, by the way, presents a significant contribution in its own right), opens up new sets of questions, especially in terms of future methodological and theoretical developments in the field. This book also reflects the changing institutional location of business historians, who increasingly make their careers in business schools rather than history departments, especially in Europe, reopening old questions of history as a social science. There have been several calls to teach more history in business education, such as the Carnegie Foundation report (2011) that found undergraduate business education too narrow in focus and highlighted the need to integrate more liberal arts teaching into the curriculum. However, in the contemporary research-driven environment of business and management schools, historical understanding is unlikely to permeate the curriculum if historical analysis cannot first deliver significant theoretical contributions. This is the central theme around which this edited volume revolves, and it marks a milestone in this ongoing debate. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should add that even though I did not contribute to this volume, I have coauthored with several of its contributors and view this book as central to my current research practice.)
Refreshingly, there are no rhetorical skirmishes over the Chandlerian or even the post-Chandlerian paradigm. Instead, what this book delivers is a solid transdisciplinary debate between business historians and organization scholars that sets out the meanings of different disciplinary origins in their arguments for a historical analysis of organizations. Not all of this will be music to business historians’ ears—because this book also highlights the drastically different epistemological aims that underpin research designs in the humanities and the social sciences. These chasms cannot always be overcome easily, and they might well signal a significant reorientation for those business historians and organization scholars who want to engage with the interdisciplinary space that is emerging under the label of management and organizational history. But, equally, I would not agree with Hüseyin Leblebici's quite negative conclusion that only a transdisciplinary collaboration between historians and social scientists is ultimately feasible and equitable. So the sum of the different perspectives in this edited volume is its overarching contribution: the presentation of a variety of positions that allows scholars to trace possible future directions for a better integration of historical approaches in management studies. And this is a magnificent and timely achievement on which the editors should be congratulated.
Turning to the individual authors, the list of their names reads like a who's who. Readers of this journal will be familiar with the business historians who contributed, such as Geoffrey Jones and JoAnne Yates, who in many cases have also published in leading management journals. However, readers of this journal might be less familiar with some of the eminent organization theorists, for example, Leblebici, Roy Suddaby, Howard Aldrich, and John Hassard, who provide important insights into the contemporary social scientific understanding of history.
The book is split into three parts: “History and Theory,” “Actors and Markets,” and “Sources and Methods.” The first and last parts are the most cohesive, while the middle part contains the most diverse set of contributions in a volume that is, overall, unusually focused and tightly edited. The first section, on theory, already suggests some of the key issues that consistently emerge in interdisciplinary work; most contributors in this section are social scientists. The one collaboration between an organization scholar and a historian is Behlül Üsdiken and Matthias Kipping's historiography of the diverging paths of management history and management studies—so, not theory in the strict sense of the word. While management studies sought to establish itself as management “science,” management history continued to espouse a narrative style in line with other historical research. Similarly, Michael Rowlinson and Hassard, while both trained sociologists, have each conducted historical and archival research and here present a critique of both fields, rather than a theoretical treatment. Thus, while Üsdiken and Kipping trace the divergence and potential reconvergence of history and management, Rowlinson and Hassard critically dissect the “cultural turn” in management and in history, carefully identifying different ways in which scholars have tried to bridge the divide, especially from a deconstructionist perspective. Both chapters highlight that in fact a variety of tentative interdisciplinary research agendas are evolving as part of the emerging field of management and organizational history.
The other contributions in this section are more clearly social scientific in orientation and deal explicitly with theory. The absence of explicitly theoretical chapters by historians underscores to some extent Leblebici's conclusions. He argues that historians approach “narrative as theory,” as opposed to the “general theory” orientation of social scientists (p. 72). He is, of course, one of only a few scholars with a sophisticated understanding of both historical research designs and the theory-driven research questions that organization scholars ask. Business historians would not necessarily be familiar with his well-known historical account of the evolution of the radio industry in the United States (Leblebici et al., “Institutional Change and the Transformation of Interorganizational Fields,” Administrative Science Quarterly [Sept. 1991]). Its theory-driven narrative illustrates perfectly what social scientists mean when they say that their discipline needs more history—which does not necessarily match how historians would interpret this statement. Leblebici is skeptical about the possibility of greater integration between history and organization studies; he argues instead for “transdisciplinarity,” meaning that each side continues to deliver its research results on its terms. He underpins his argument with a detailed analysis of the relative failure of interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Economic History Review, Business History Review, Business History) to be cited within their main disciplines. Leblebici's analysis should indeed give pause to everyone reading this journal, and journal editors even more so, as it raises questions about how a multidisciplinary field like business history can engage a variety of audiences with different presentation styles and research traditions. But I do disagree with his conclusions, firstly because I do not consider interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary agendas to be mutually exclusive, and secondly because the standing working group on history at the European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) and relatively new journals such as Management & Organizational History have been very successful as platforms for interdisciplinary discourse. In fact, the EGOS track received more than fifty submissions for only twenty-five slots in 2015, highlighting an increasing interest within organization studies for what historical approaches have to offer.
Leblebici's contribution is followed by two interesting chapters that discuss the opportunities for interdisciplinary work within two major theoretical domains in organizational research: institutional theory and evolutionary theory. The chapter by Suddaby, William Foster, and Albert Mills introduces the core concepts of new institutionalism—institutional fields and isomorphism—as well as the more recent developments of institutional entrepreneurship and work. Institutions themselves are familiar to business historians, of course, especially through economic history's engagement with new institutional economics, but the sociological strand of institutional theory is certainly underappreciated. However, many of the above-mentioned concepts are far more suitable to the often qualitative and small-scale, yet very dense, data collection techniques of business historians. Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, is better suited to either industry-level analysis or very long time periods. Even though this approach is related to organizational ecology and corporate demography, it offers far better opportunities to integrate historical concepts and approaches, as Stephen Lippmann and Howard Aldrich argue. On reading their chapter alongside the classic introductory text by Aldrich and Martin Ruef, Organizations Evolving (2006), it is clear that evolutionary theory also offers useful concepts to business historians oriented more to structural history, such as age, period, and cohort effects. Age refers to the length of an organization's existence, while period reflects the conditions of its founding environment; cohorts are a combination of the two, in effect generational groupings of organizations that reflect not just a similar age but also similar founding conditions. These concepts allow both contextualization and comparison within and across a number of historical cases of firm evolution.
The second section, “Actors and Markets,” which features interesting essays, is more eclectic overall. What holds it together is that it represents attempts by historical researchers to conceptualize their research designs with social science theory. Jeffrey Fear reflects on the mutual relevance of organizational learning and detailed historical analysis, while Marcelo Bucheli and Jin Uk Kim review theoretical insights—from political science (selectorate theory) to organization studies (legitimacy theory), and other areas—that are relevant to business historians working on emerging economies. Somewhat different in nature is the discussion by David Kirsch, Mahka Moeen, and Wadhwani of the potential uses of stylized facts, which they classify as attenuated narratives. Particularly in cases of industry formation, where “start dates” can be hard to identify—a thorny issue for corporate demography; see, for example, Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan, The Demography of Corporations and Industries (2000)—the stylized fact links historical insights to more social scientific research designs. The chapter by Wadhwani and Jones stands out because it might have been a better fit for the theory section, especially because it actually extrapolates historical theory and suggests applications to organizational research (in this case, applying historical temporalities to entrepreneurship) rather than vice versa. Theory derived from history and applied to organizational theory is still very rare, and Wadhwani and Jones's chapter suggests that interdisciplinary research has greater scope than what Leblebici's contribution allows for.
The book ends with an immensely useful methods section, which will likely be referenced frequently in the future, especially for the contributions by Kenneth Lipartito and by Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli. For business historians, Yates's contribution is noteworthy, as she presents more or less the methodological counterpart to Leblebici's theoretical treatment of the differences between business history and organization studies. She compares and contrasts the different modes of presentation that follow either a narrative or a social scientific format. These two modes reflect different underlying methodological assumptions: historians assume a certain familiarity with archival research and rich contextual knowledge of the time period, whereas organization scholars are less interested in the empirical setting of their research than in how interesting cases contribute to a body of theories. These are the visible differences that stem from Leblebici's two modes of theorizing, and their methodological implications go beyond just amending the representation of one's research towards greater reflection of research designs and objectives.
Considering the wealth and quality of its contributions, Organizations in Time will likely remain a significant reference volume for scholars interested in the “historic turn” in management and organization studies—be they business historians or organization scholars.
