This article reinterprets open strategy (OS) as historically framed openness, challenging its portrayal as a recent managerial innovation. Drawing on Alan Fox's frames of reference - unitary, pluralist, and radical - we conceptualize openness as a historically variable configuration of authority, participation, disclosure, legitimacy, and power. Adopting an interpretive and conceptual-historical approach, the article reconnects contemporary OS practices with earlier institutional debates over information disclosure and workplace democracy. Through a dialogue between industrial relations theory and historical organization studies, we show how practices of transparency and inclusion rework long-standing tensions between managerial control and employee participation. By tracing continuities from twentieth-century disclosure practices to contemporary participatory initiatives, the analysis reveals how claims of openness simultaneously evoke and obscure the history of industrial democracy. The article contributes to historical organization studies by demonstrating how contemporary strategy concepts are shaped by longer institutional trajectories of participation and governance.
Joseph A. Schumpeter is conventionally understood as a thoroughly European intellectual figure, his foundational concepts emerging from Central European debates in Vienna, Bonn, and later Harvard. This article argues that this genealogy contains a significant omission: Schumpeter's year in Cairo (1907-1908), during which he completed his first major work, Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen National & ouml;konomie (1908), while employed by an Italian legal-financial firm embedded in colonial Egypt's cosmopolitan economy. Drawing on published economic histories, biographical sources, and Schumpeter's own writings, and situating the analysis within debates on Eurocentrism in management and entrepreneurship scholarship, the article reconstructs the economic, institutional, and urban conditions of Cairo in 1907-1908 and examines their structural affinities with Schumpeter's subsequent theoretical concerns. Rather than proposing direct causal influence, the argument demonstrates that Cairo's conditions, its institutional plurality, credit-driven development, multiethnic entrepreneurship, and economic volatility, resonate structurally with the conceptual vocabulary Schumpeter would develop across his career. Crucially, Schumpeter himself wrote in his 1934 preface to Theory of Economic Development that 'some of the ideas submitted in this book go back as far as 1907', the Cairo year. The article advances three contributions: a decolonial reframing of entrepreneurship theory's genealogy; a historical reconstruction of Cairo as a dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem in its own right; and a transferable five-step framework for reading canonical theory against the environments of its formation. By restoring Cairo to Schumpeter's intellectual biography, the article demonstrates that the origins of entrepreneurship theory are more globally entangled than canonical accounts admit.
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.
