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History, a Useful “Science” for Management? A Response

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Andrew Popp
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Abstract

In response to Eric Godelier's call for a partnership between business history and the management sciences I argue for a vision of business history as history. Whilst acknowledging the institutional and intellectual pressures to which the discipline is subject I argue such a turn is important for the continued health of the field. Such a turn will, however, also require engaging with fundamental questions of epsitemology.

Type
Forum
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 831 - 836
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2009. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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References

1. Godelier, “History, a Useful ‘Science’.”

2. Ibid.

3. Charles, Harvey and Wilson, John, “Redefining Business History: An Editorial Statement,” Business History 49 (2007): 5.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 4. Richard Whittington suggests this is a cause for gratitude; “to the extent that business history has moved into the business schools in the last decades, then it is to managerial capitalism that business historians owe their living … Given their employ therefore, it behoves business historians to treat managerial capitalism with particular care.” Richard, Whittington, “Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on the Managerial Revolution,” Business History 49 (2007): 399–403,Google Scholar quote from 399. Strategy and structure, in other words, should be our bread and butter. This line is essentially repeated by Franco Amatori, when he argues that the adjective “business” is “practically the equivalent of ‘ firm,’” compelling us “to be very familiar with the economic theory of the firm.” Franco, Amatori, “Business History as History,” Business History 51 (2009): 143–56,Google Scholar quote from 144. Very little of my own work contains any, let alone all, of the types of data identified as absolute requisites in Amatori’s definition of the field. Godelier’s “renewed scientific goal for historians and management specialists” seems to share significant parallels with the programmes advanced by Whittington and Amatori. Godelier, “History, A Useful ‘ Science’.”

5. Harvey, and Wilson, , “Redefining Business History,” 4.Google Scholar

6. Godelier, “History, a Useful ‘ Science’.”

7. Harvey and Wilson, op. cit., 3.

8. Barbara, Czarniawska, “A Four Times Told Tale: Combining Narrative and Scientific Knowledge in Organization Studies,” Organization 4(1997): 7–30,Google Scholar quote from 24.

9. William, Gartner, “Entrepreneurial Narrative and a Science of the Imagination,” Journal of Business Venturing 22(2007): 613–27,Google Scholar quote from 622. The epistemological gulf between narrative and mainstream approaches is highlighted by Gartner through his assertion that narratives should not serve any “normative rationality … as data for the grist of management scholarship,” [621].

10. Czarniawska, op. cit., 16.

11. Amatori, op. cit., 151.

12. Czarniawska, op. cit., 16.

13. Quoted in Gartner, , “Entrepreneurial Narrative and a Science of the Imagination,” 622.Google Scholar