Developing historical consciousness in management learners

Abstract

This article argues and advocates strategies for the development of historical consciousness to stimulate both first- and second-order critical reflexivity in management students with the goal of creating critical management learners. The historic turn in management and organizational studies has demonstrated that history is not the same as the past. This understanding has had implications for many areas of investigation but has not been felt as significantly as it might be in management learning and education. To make our argument, we discuss how archives can be used to stimulate the process of historical consciousness in management learners and we provide an illustrative example of how this can be done, together with a checklist to aid instructors in facilitating student use of archival material.