Supplementing the Record

Interviewing eyewitnesses of history has been a research methodology since ancient times, and was a key evidentiary component of historical accounts until the nineteenth century.^{Footnote 5} Even at this point, oral sources remained a valued form of evidence, from Henry Mayhews’s surveys of urban working-class life to Jules Michelet’s gathering of “living documents” for his monumental History of the French Revolution. Michelet used oral evidence to counterbalance the singular political angle of official documents: “My inquiry among living documents taught me many things that are not in our statistics.”^{Footnote 6}

History’s emergence as a professional, academic occupation undermined oral testimony. Historical training, which in nineteenth-century Europe was led by Leopold von Ranke, now insisted on the pursuit of facts obtained from documents. Trainee scholars were evaluated on their capacity to produce original work using evidence from primary documents. Documentary research thus gave the profession its own distinct methodology, assessable by its own experts, and a claim to objective neutrality. Von Ranke’s approach spread incrementally and inconsistently starting in the 1860s, from Germany, to France, across Europe, and abroad to the United States.^{Footnote 7}

In contrast to documentary materials, oral evidence was characterized as unreliable and subjective. The use of interviews, however, continued in other fields, notably by private researchers in the nineteenth century as well as sociologists at the Chicago School. It was not until after World War II that the term oral history began being applied to interviews focused on past events and practices.^{Footnote 8}

Business history occupies an important place at the beginning of this modern oral history movement. In 1948 Allan Nevins introduced the pioneering oral history project at New York’s Columbia University, where he collated recorded interviews with American elites.^{Footnote 9} The interviews formed the cornerstone of Columbia University’s archive, which has become one of the largest oral history collections in the world.^{Footnote 10} Nevins’s project fulfilled a call by British economic historian J. H. Clapham some forty years earlier. Noting the difficulty of accurately interpreting documentary sources on Britain’s wool and worsted industries, Clapham claimed that “the best original authorities [to aid in analyzing industrial development] are the memories of business-men,” and he argued for the need to capture them, “for with [these men] often die some of the most valuable records of nineteenth century economic history.”^{Footnote 11}

Nevins’s “great man” approach defined oral history in the United States for two decades. In contrast, British oral history in the 1950s and 1960s was largely concerned with history from below, giving voice to ordinary people who had been absent from documentary evidence.^{Footnote 12} As Ronald Kroeze and Jasmijn Vervloet’s and Janice Thiessen’s respective contributions to this collection demonstrate, this perspective offers a rich vein for business historians. Despite their differing focus, the British and American approaches nevertheless shared the view that interviews offered important evidence that could be gathered and added to the archive.

The use of oral history sources in business history journals has largely followed the practices of the first wave of oral historians, who identified interviewees as a means of filling gaps in extant documentary records. While their evidence was certainly weighed carefully, it appears to have been analyzed as various forms of eyewitness accounts: descriptions of events beyond the direct reach of the historian that helped explain how and why things happened as and when they did. This included insights into the strategies of firms, the reasons for management decision making, and details of interfirm transactions.^{Footnote 13} Oral history also gave access to workers’ perspectives on particular management strategies as well as their impact on work.^{Footnote 14} It provided evidence about organizational culture shaping ideas and approaches to research and training, and the mechanisms facilitating interaction between firms and business schools.^{Footnote 15} Interviews revealed kinship networks within family firms and their impact on business decision-making processes.^{Footnote 16} They were used to explore intergenerational changes in work-life experiences,^{Footnote 17} clashes between personalities and approaches that negatively affected organizational cultures,^{Footnote 18} managerial attitudes toward structural change,^{Footnote 19} the reasons and rationales for firms’ policies and practices,^{Footnote 20} and the influence of religious affiliations and personal connections on recruitment practices and employment prospects.^{Footnote 21} Oral history proved particularly adept at revealing undocumented details of relationships, including those between government and business,^{Footnote 22} along supply chains,^{Footnote 23} and between executives within firms.^{Footnote 24} It also provided access to examine mistakes and failed strategies, including the problems arising from joint ventures between firms with different goals and operational practices.^{Footnote 25} Such examples illustrate the wide range of work in business history that utilized oral history to trace otherwise undocumented historical events, practices, beliefs, and ideas. Geoffrey Jones and Rachael Comunale’s and Robert Crawford’s respective contributions in this collection similarly use oral testimony to unearth undocumented experiences.

The accounts listed above largely used small numbers of interviews to supplement archival and other documentary sources. This reflects the tenor of the discipline as much as the nature of research projects. Even where considerable use was made of interviews, there was often little critical engagement with the interview process, and few reflections on memory. Business oral history thus shares methodological similarities with early postwar oral history in that the interview was primarily a source of information about factual events.^{Footnote 26} There are, of course, many differences, notably business history’s greater engagement with archival, documentary, and data sources, and, until at least the mid-1990s, its focus on elites.

Oral historians’ uncritical use of interviews during the early postwar phase left them open to criticism. Memory, critics noted, “was distorted by physical deterioration and nostalgia in old age, by the personal bias of both interviewer and interviewee, and by the influence of collective and retrospective versions of the past.”^{Footnote 27} Critics argued that evidence based on memory provided a flimsy base for any substantive argument. Oral historians subsequently sought to construct oral history as a rigorous, scientific methodology.^{Footnote 28} In doing so, they sought to limit the extent to which memory, subjectivity, and power relations between interviewer and interviewee distorted qualitative data as it was being gathered.^{Footnote 29}

The formation of the Oral History Association (OHA) in 1967 signaled an important shift in this direction. Despite the increased deployment of oral history during the 1960s, there were no clearly defined parameters, objectives, or processes for the recording and interpretation of oral history. The OHA sought to professionalize the field by prescribing set forms of practice and technique. The aim was to provide oral histories some authoritative equivalence with the archive.^{Footnote 30} Concerns about methodologies that could produce objective recollections were also a response to positivist thinking, and the difficulties oral historians faced in meeting its exacting standards.^{Footnote 31} In a further counterbalance to this, oral historians also challenged documentary historians on the selectivity and bias inherent in their own sources of evidence.

It was not until the mid-1990s that business history journals included detailed descriptions of oral history methodologies. A decade later, commentary on data-gathering methods had become more regular, reflecting the field’s engagement with broader social science methodological approaches. More recently, such comments have become more commonplace. Articles usually outline sample sizes, recruitment and interview processes, and reflections on oral history’s benefits.^{Footnote 32} The limitations and weaknesses of oral history interviewing have similarly received greater attention.^{Footnote 33} Some historians also discuss methodological frameworks deployed to counter oral history’s limitations.^{Footnote 34}

While such scholarship points to an increased engagement with methodological issues, serious reflection on oral history methodology and interpretation is not yet commonplace. This absence offers support to calls elsewhere for business historians to pay greater attention to methodology, a point that Matthew Bailey underscores in his contribution to this collection.^{Footnote 35} It also indicates that despite business history’s pioneering contribution to the field of oral history, it has followed its own evolutionary trajectory. However, in more recent times, these separate strands have reconnected as intellectual innovations in oral history scholarship enter business history literature. As the articles in the collection demonstrate, oral history and business history have a shared future.

Recalibrating Oral History

In the late 1970s, and in the face of ongoing criticism about memory’s subjectivity and fallibility, innovative oral historians turned a weakness into a strength. They claimed that individual subjectivity provided clues about the meaning of history as well as relationships between memory and identity and between individuals and society. Memory thus “became the subject as well as the source of oral history, and oral historians began to use an … array of approaches—linguistic, narrative, cultural, psychoanalytic and ethnographic—in their analysis and use of oral history interviews.”^{Footnote 36}

In the process of implementing these “new” approaches, business historians have ventured beyond descriptive accounts of oral history practices and cursory nods to its inherent strengths and weaknesses. Over the last decade, business historians have thus increasingly engaged with some of the broader issues raised by oral history.

Significantly, the growing engagement with oral history has encouraged business historians to engage with other historians who utilize and explore oral history, within business history and beyond. Observing that “oral history is a relative newcomer in the accounting history field and has scarcely begun in the management history field,” Lee Parker acknowledges oral history’s growing presence at the turn of the twenty-first century, but does not comment on the nature of accounting historians’ engagement with oral history.^{Footnote 37} In their 1991 assessment of oral history in accounting, Marilyn Collins and Robert Bloom advocated its use “to confirm or refute any hypotheses involved in analyzing recorded history.”^{Footnote 38} However, they cautioned that it should be used “to complement the written record, or substitute for the written word if none is available,” and included the proviso that “all researchers using the oral history method should be aware of its limitations.”^{Footnote 39} Challenging this “functional” stance, Theresa Hammond and Prem Sikka drew on emerging critical scholarship across the academy and within accounting history, as well as oral history historiography, to argue that oral history “should be used to problematize claims that there is a single true universal story to be uncovered and should emphasize the multiplicity of experience that results from accounting practices.”^{Footnote 40} Oral history’s placement of everyday human agency into accounting history, they argued, enabled accounting historians to move beyond the standard accounts of regulatory development, professional recognition, and significant personalities. Their call did not fall on deaf ears: accounting historians have since embraced oral history as a tool and methodology with varying degrees of criticality.^{Footnote 41} Significantly, Hammond and Sikka’s call has also gained traction in other business fields.^{Footnote 42}

Marketing historians have been receptive to oral history, especially those with an interest in consumers and consumer behavior.^{Footnote 43} Drawing on oral history’s radical tradition, marketing historians have used oral history to move “beyond an otherwise general reliance on the findings of a small number of contemporaneous market research reports.”^{Footnote 44} In revealing the “consumers’ point of view,”^{Footnote 45} oral history offers access to “the meaning ordinary people have given to brands,”^{Footnote 46} as well as to the “inner feelings and states of mind that are frequently absent from or disguised by written records.”^{Footnote 47} In her exploration of oral history’s contribution to marketing history, Andrea Davies offers additional reasons for marketing’s receptiveness to oral history. Noting that “marketing history also holds the potential to bring a critical understanding of the interview, a ubiquitous method in marketing,” Davies not only underscores the discipline’s familiarity with oral history practices but also recognizes oral history’s capacity to inform contemporary practice.^{Footnote 48}

Management historians have been relatively late converts to oral history. Ronald Mitchell’s 1996 analysis of entrepreneurs was one of the first studies to identify itself as an oral history. Significantly, it draws on cognitive information processing theory but makes no reference to oral history scholarship.^{Footnote 49} In their special collection on historical methods for Management & Organizational History, Anna Linda Musacchio Adorisio and Alistair Mutch offer an explanation for Mitchell’s approach. Observing the “considerable sophistication” of debates within oral history historiography around the reliability of memory and its interpretation, they contend that similar discussions are to be found in the social sciences. Such differences are thus “largely illusory, the product more of disciplinary conventions.”^{Footnote 50} Martyna Sliwa’s contribution to that collection^{Footnote 51} (and elsewhere)^{Footnote 52} nevertheless indicates that the embrace of oral history among management historians remains limited. Observing the ongoing lack of “conceptual and empirical exchange between management and organization scholars … and oral historians,” Sliwa ardently urges management and organizational historians to embrace oral history as a tool and a methodology that had “changed me as a researcher and as a person.”^{Footnote 53} Over the last decade, contributors to Management & Organizational History have increasingly engaged with oral history as a tool,^{Footnote 54} along with methodological issues, notably those pertaining to memory.^{Footnote 55} By 2017 oral history’s “method and its disciplinary engagement with memory studies” had become recognized as an “acceptable” and familiar approach for organization and work studies scholars, as well as for business historians more generally.^{Footnote 56}

Within the conventional business history field, researchers demonstrate a growing awareness of methodological debates surrounding oral history. Many articles tread the well-worn path in highlighting oral history’s capacity to complement official sources. However, their critical reflections on oral history methodology display greater nuance, drawing on broader debates to recognize the insights afforded by engaging with the complexities of interview data.^{Footnote 57} Noting that “oral history shows how elements of the linguistic turn can be incorporated, while at the same time remaining understandable by not forgetting to connect history to reality,” Ronald Kroeze and Sjoerd Keulen underscore this broadening engagement while reiterating oral history’s appropriateness for business historians.^{Footnote 58} Significantly, the growth of critical awareness across these accounts has also seen business historians interrogate their own contribution to oral history. John Walton thus challenges the view that business historians have been pioneering oral historians and advocates active engagement with oral history debates.^{Footnote 59}

Of course, business historians still have much to do in this space. Despite the growing interaction with broader historical methodologies, various issues remain underexamined. While Patrick Fridenson notes that feminist approaches have “completely changed our understanding of internal and external labor markets,”^{Footnote 60} Gabrielle Durepos, Alan McKinlay, and Scott Taylor observe that women in business history “remain marginal to central debates.”^{Footnote 61} As some of the articles in this collection indicate, challenges remain in gathering such data, but oral history can provide an opportunity to address this issue. It similarly provides a platform for collecting other absent or muted perspectives, including race, religion, and sexuality, and integrating them into business history.

Sharing the Future

As Linda Shopes has noted, the history of oral history tends to be described as a move from understanding interviews as archival documents to understanding them as narrative constructions, “with attendant concerns about memory, subjectivity, and identity that must be interpreted.”^{Footnote 62} This characterization, she notes, is not misleading, but it does lack nuance. Early oral historians certainly engaged with issues concerning memory and subjectivity, while much recent oral history work still largely focuses on adding to and filling out the archive.^{Footnote 63}

Although we have suggested that oral business history evolved separately from mainstream oral history, Shopes’s assessment can also be applied to it, albeit across quite different time frames. The absence of methodological discussions or critiques of interview data until relatively recently does not mean that business historians were oblivious to the nature of their sources. Schooled in social science methodologies, many display a critical awareness of the interview process. Oral history’s capacity to fill gaps in the archive and to document specialist knowledge has been and remains a prime motivator for business historians to use it as a tool.^{Footnote 64} There has also been, however belatedly, a more critical engagement with issues of methodology and interpretation, which is a discernible shift in sophistication across business history.^{Footnote 65}

The converging trajectories of business oral history and oral history in recent years offer mutual, beneficial opportunities. For business historians, this intersection provides a means to expand interpretative accounts and to incorporate new methodological approaches. It also reveals the increased possibilities that narrative and memory studies offer while reiterating the need to consider the collection and analysis of evidence.^{Footnote 66} The articles in this special edition seek to find this balance, illustrating the ways that stories simultaneously reconstruct the past as they document it. By identifying alternative perspectives (see Jones and Comunale; Kroeze and Vervloet), analyzing storytelling and narratives (see Crawford; Thiessen), and discussing methodological approaches (see Bailey), each of the contributors here demonstrates oral history’s capacity to enhance the breadth and depth of business history.

For oral historians, exposure to business historians’ oral history accounts offers new perspectives on both methodology and interpretation. Business history’s use of social science approaches reminds us that interviewing is not the sole preserve of the oral historian. The range of subdisciplines that fall under the “business” umbrella likewise enable business historians to draw on a broad range of methodologies unfamiliar to oral historians. To this end, business history presents a layer of context to the historical record that has frequently been ignored by mainstream oral historians. As business historians embrace leaders and pioneers, on the one hand, and increasingly look beyond and below them, on the other hand, their work reiterates the need for historians to understand both the elite and the marginalized and the interactions between them. Finally, business historians’ consideration of the ways that oral history might inform contemporary business practice presents a timely reminder to oral historians, and indeed all historians, that their work performs a key role in connecting the past and the present.

By critically engaging with oral history and exploring its possibilities and contribution to business history, the contributors to this special collection offer examples of critical approaches to the gathering and interpretation of oral history interviews. They also highlight the opportunities for oral historians and business historians to engage with one another’s work. It is hoped that these articles will stimulate deeper and further dialogue between the two groups that will ultimately enrich broader understandings of the theory and practice of oral history.