History in Management and Organization Studies

1  Objective

Finding History in Management Research

Introduction

This initial chapter lays out the overall aims of the book and puts the remainder in context, namely by looking at how history has recently become of interest in general and, somewhat more surprisingly perhaps, has also found a growing number of “fans” within management and organization studies—though the one type of history they don’t seem particularly interested in is the history of management, both as a practice and as an idea. In what follows, the chapter will first look at the wildly different levels of interest in history, then provide a summary of the apparent rationale—and the reality—of the growing calls for “more history” in mainstream management research and, lastly, ...