Which mechanisms can the owners of a large firm use to ensure control when the firm grows, diversifies and merges with others and they lose some ownership? We discuss the sometimes conflicting relationships among the founders, shareholders, and managers of the Madrid to Zaragoza and Alicante Railway Company, a Spanish firm that was in operation between 1856 and 1941. We review the mechanisms through which communication among the stakeholders flowed in an effort to bridge possible conflicts of interests. From a historical perspective, we also show the effectiveness of the mechanisms adopted by the owners (mainly the Rothschild family) to ensure control over the company. We highlight how the executive committee played a key role in taking control of the firm. Rather than documenting a classic principal - agent conflict between owners and managers, this paper demonstrates how agency problems were mitigated through a combination of trusted managerial elites, committee-based governance, and shareholder control mechanisms. In doing so, it qualifies agency theory by showing how governance arrangements were contingent on historically specific institutional and ownership structures.
This paper contributes to entrepreneurial history by addressing our limited micro-level understanding of how small, provincial cultural enterprises operated outside London in nineteenth-century Britain. While research on Victorian entrepreneurship and family business has focused largely on large manufacturers and metropolitan firms, far less is known about how entrepreneurial processes unfolded within small, local cultural enterprises. Using a microhistorical approach, the paper reconstructs the development of the Glasgow pianoforte business of James S. Kerr using census data, post office directories, newspapers, music publications, and probate records. The analysis traces the firm's evolution from piano tuning into retailing and music publishing and examines how entrepreneurial activity was enacted through skill recombination, diversification, and household-based organization. The study shows how a small provincial enterprise generated social mobility, expanded geographically, and created an enduring family business legacy despite operating within a fragmented and service-intensive market. By demonstrating how entrepreneurial processes can be reconstructed from non-financial archival sources, the paper highlights the importance of place, embeddedness, and small-scale enterprise in the Victorian cultural economy. More broadly, it illustrates how microhistorical analysis can enhance our understanding of entrepreneurship as a set of processes through which economic and social change was enacted over time.
Although the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWSM) - a broad-based mobilization responding to concerns about inequality and accountability - was short-lived as a protest mobilization and often dismissed as lacking strategic direction, it articulated a sustained critique that continues to shape how corporate power and inequality are publicly debated. Drawing on a systematic analysis of 36 issues of six publications produced during OWSM occupations across the United States, this study revisits the movement's historical legacy by reconstructing how it framed and advanced a corporate-focused delegitimation discourse. The analysis identifies a central frame organized around the notion of undue corporate societal domination, supported by a consistent diagnostic framing that attributes corporate illegitimacy to political capture, economic deception, and cultural pollution. It also reveals an unsettled prognostic framing, divided between reformist orientations aimed at regulating corporate power and radical positions calling for its dismantling. Distinct from movements organized around specific policy demands, we show that the OWSM's historical significance lay in its capacity to sustain an open-ended critique that questioned corporate legitimacy across multiple societal spheres. The study advances theorizing on corporate delegitimation by demonstrating how diagnostic and prognostic frames mobilized distinct challenges to corporations' evaluative and cognitive legitimacy.
Using a microhistorical approach to address the application and evolution of power in administrative processes as a persistent gap in philanthropy research, we investigate how work is done in private multi-purpose foundations, especially in their early and expansion phases when new routines and structures are established. Examining the Rockefeller Foundation's small-grant projects for UK university administrators and library specialists in 1934-1937 and linking archival data to social and historical theory, we detect persuasion as a special form of social power routinely applied in 'rational' grant administration. By further identifying co-production of persuasive power and bureaucratic rule at the center of a social economy through which elite benevolence is administered, and beneficiaries are controlled, Strauss's 'negotiated order' emerges as a useful theoretical framing for microhistory and organizational analysis. Providing a counterweight to the biographical study of foundations' richest benefactors and their hand-picked senior managers, our study illuminates how distinctly cultivated persuasion enables lower-ranking foundation elites with no formal jurisdiction to gain power through administrative discretion and network brokerage. This research direction may reflect early perception of, and reaction to, special problems in managing knowledge workers and imposing order on their research aims in past and present private philanthropy.
In this anniversary essay, we argue that the traditional, often sterile methods of historical investigation in management- and organizational history have left out some of the most essential ingredients: creativity, empathy, emotions and collectivity. These human traits, we suggest, are not just nice to have. They are critical components of any serious historian's toolkit. Far too often, historical analysis is seen as a purely rational exercise, devoid of the messy, emotional engagement that is key to historical methods. We challenge this notion, proposing that creativity, emotions, intuition, and collectivity are not just incidental. They are heuristics that allow historians to uncover and nuance the past. We humorously, yet seriously, advocate for a more human-centered approach to historical inquiry, one that embraces the full spectrum of human traits that drive us to uncover, understand, and sometimes even fall in love with the past. So, as we celebrate another milestone for Management and Organizational History, we would like its future authors and contributors to remember that historical investigation is not just a science, but an inherently human endeavor - one that thrives on empathy, creativity, and the occasional unplanned discovery.
This paper employs archival methods to explore the emergence in the 1990s of a group of English and Welsh charities known as National Health Service (NHS) Charities. We provide a detailed discussion of the changing regulatory, political, social, and technical environment in which charities were operating in the 1980s and, drawing on the Strategic Action Fields (SAF) framework, argue that changing managerial norms created new standards for both the Charity Commissioners for England and Wales and the wider charity sector. As a result, concerns about the extant management of charitable funds in the NHS gained traction. Subsequent action by the Commissioners then facilitated the creation of NHS Charities as a specific organizational identity, and, we argue, concurrently constructed the framework for an emerging NHS Charities' SAF. This case study provides a model of how state regulation - shaped by wider political norms - can impact nonprofit organizational formation and identity.
A New History of Management (ANHOM) was underpinned by a theory that management history was far more 'male, pale, and stale' than the histories of comparable fields. This contributed to management and organization studies' relative lack of innovative developments. It caused a stir. ANHOM was criticized, but not because it was exceptional. It was largely because the title of the book was seen as provocative - taken by some as indicating that earlier work was no longer valid. But we chose the 'A,' rather than a 'The' in the title carefully. We were arguing that conventional histories of management should be added too, not replaced. Just as architecture's history included different forms, practices and philosophy from different parts of the world and contexts, providing a well-spring of potential influences to draw from, we argued that management should do the same. We reflect on the impact of ANHOM, the progress the field has made in opening our lens on the pasts of our field, and what remains to be done. We argue that we do not need 'The' new history of management, but the continued development of many more histories from a broader range of places and perspectives.
Over the past 15 years, rhetorical history has become a prominent construct in management organization history, yet its rapid development has produced conceptual ambiguities that limit its analytic usefulness. This paper surveys the evolution of rhetorical history research, clarifying what the construct is - and is not - while identifying critical gaps that must be addressed for the field to advance. We argue that rhetorical history has too often been treated as a method, a stable organizational attribute, or a mere marketing device, obscuring its more fundamental role as a dynamic process of narrative construction. We offer a refined definition of rhetorical history as the process of constructing repeatable historical narratives to address internal and external audiences in support of organizational goals. This process-oriented conceptualization distinguishes rhetorical history from adjacent constructs such as memory work and temporal work and highlights its inherently forward-looking, future-shaping character.
We investigate the largely untapped potential of internet memes as primary historical sources. Conceptualizing memes as the digital successors to political cartoons, this study addresses two pivotal questions: How can memes serve as historical evidence within organizational studies, and what methodological challenges do they pose? We contend that memes are indispensable to the concept of 'Present Time History,' as they provide real-time documentation of public responses to complex phenomena, thereby revealing alternative chronologies often marginalized or absent in formal records. As collective, emergent expressions, memes encapsulate the transient social mood and polarized discourses. Their use as historical sources necessitates nuanced methodological approaches concerning their production, preservation, and accessibility, since they differentiate from traditional archival materials. This study advances four principal contributions: (1) unveiling silenced voices and alternative temporal narratives; (2) addressing the unique challenges posed by digital sources, including their ephemerality, fungibility, and inherent satirical nature; (3) reinforcing the discipline's commitment to democratizing history beyond official documents; and (4) proposing future pathways such as the development of dedicated meme archives and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. History is continually being constructed in real time on digital platforms, thus we offer a novel lens for the analysis of visual artifacts within organizational studies.
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Management & Organizational History, this article reflects on academic writing as a historical practice through which scholars make history from within history. Using Sartre's progressive - regressive method, we analyze our own writing trajectories to show how style emerges at the intersection of constraint and agency. The regressive moment reveals how factors such as class background, disciplinary norms, reviewers, and the 'publish or perish' culture shape what writing can become. The progressive moment then traces how we work within these conditions to reclaim our voice. Rather than offering rules for 'better' writing, we invite readers to reflect on their stylistic histories as lived negotiations between discipline and desire. We close by highlighting M&OH's longstanding commitment to experimentation and plurality, which has provided space for our own stylistic development and continues to foster diverse voices.
Storytelling is endemic to historiography and can be the cornerstone of compelling theorization. Yet, critical knowledge on literary writing has remained outside the historic turn. Consequently, the methodological toolbox for historically grounded theorization remains unnecessarily limited. Exploring the epistemological appeal of historiographical literary writing to MOS, and how scholars can employ it to advance the historic turn, this essay centers on immersive storytelling. Developed in other disciplines, this technique is apropos to the historic turn, because through contextualization it can engage the senses, trigger emotions, and create a sense of 'being there,' thus transmitting deep (visceral) understandings of organizational phenomena. To help MOS scholars realize historiography's immersive potential, six techniques are discussed - world-building, evocative descriptions, multidimensional character development, engaging plot development, maintaining attentional focus, and emotional resonance - which can advance MOS through at least three topics: organizational path dependence, entrepreneurship, and neo-institutional theory.
This paper introduces the concept of shadow futures to examine how imagined futures continue to influence organizational life even after they are no longer actively pursued or openly acknowledged. While much research has explored the lasting impact of the past and the role of imagined futures in present actions, less attention has been paid to futures that have faded, been displaced, or rendered unspeakable. Drawing on a processual approach to temporality and work on organizational memory and absence, the paper develops a framework for understanding how such past-futures persist. It identifies three interconnected modes through which shadow futures exert influence: inherent structuring, where past-futures remain embedded in routines and infrastructure; reactivation through reframing, where past-futures are selectively reintroduced in new contexts; and silencing the foreclosed, where disavowed past-futures continue to constrain what can be imagined or said. By attending to these quieter forms of temporal persistence, the paper contributes to research on temporality, memory, and future-making, offering a way to understand organizational life as situated within layered and sometimes haunted temporal landscapes.
This reflective essay revisits my 2013 article, 'The Silence of the Archives,' to explore its origins, reception, and continuing relevance for management and organizational history. I discuss the epistemic and methodological debates that shaped the original piece, including historiographical traditions, postcolonial theory, and the challenges of interdisciplinary engagement. The essay considers the 'after-history' of the article, particularly in light of digitization, oral history, and the rise of born-digital sources, and reflects on how these developments intersect with enduring archival silences. By situating archival research within broader conversations on reflexivity, narrative construction, and historical imagination, I argue for a more critical and inclusive approach to historical methods in management and organization studies.
Historical imagination is an established method of ensuring rigorous objectivity in historical research. This essay reconceptualizes historical imagination, not as a neutral tool for historiographic rigor, but as a reflexive and evaluative tool by which researchers can expose the processes by which institutions use rhetorical history. Drawing on critical reinterpretations of Collingwood's notion of historical imagination offered by social theorists, this essay proposes an alternative use of historical imagination that embraces presentism to understand how rhetorical history is used to create, maintain and transform institutions. The essay demonstrates how imposing the present on the past can help reveal the institutional work of rhetorical history.
Entrepreneurship is often celebrated as the pursuit of opportunity and venture creation, yet such perspectives obscure its broader historical and socio-cultural dimensions. This article advances the concept of entrepreneurialism as the ideology of entrepreneurship that defines who counts as a legitimate agent of change and which actions are valued. We engage 'rethinking' as a historically informed and critical practice that enacts a double movement: unsettling dominant narratives while affirming emergent possibilities. Drawing on insights from the interdisciplinary research project 'Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society,' we mobilize craft and Indigenous entrepreneurship as historically rich provocations that expose assumptions in dominant concepts and open vantage points for reconfiguring entrepreneurship. This approach makes visible the ideological work of entrepreneurialism and opens space to imagine more plural futures for entrepreneurship theory and history.
This paper explores the multiplicity of time in organizational life through the lens of life-history interviews with business elites, conducted as part of a longitudinal Bourdieusian study of power dynamics within French and British business systems. Drawing on Braudel's concept of the dialectic between the longue dur & eacute;e and l'histoire & eacute;v & eacute;nementielle, we examine how the professional trajectories of three senior executives & horbar; a global asset management CEO, a multinational media CEO, and an energy sector managing director & horbar; reveal the interplay between sustained patience and transformative critical incidents. The findings highlight how temporal multiplicity shapes managerial agency and decision-making, demonstrating that organizational lives unfold in rhythms punctuated by pivotal moments requiring reflexive action. In emphasizing the value of patience amid turbulent conditions, we contribute to temporal theorizing in organizational studies by illuminating how historical reflexivity and temporal plurality inform leadership practices and organizational trajectories. This reflection enriches understanding of temporal dynamics that shape contemporary managerial realities.
