Historiography and the ‘historic turn’ in organization theory

Abstract

Historical researchers have consistently argued for history to be taken more seriously in organization studies (Kieser, 1994), even making the case for an ‘historic turn’ (Booth and Rowlinson, 2006; Clark and Rowlinson, 2004), or historical ‘reorientation’ within organization theory (Usdiken and Kieser, 2004). An historic turn would follow from the move towards more historical approaches in the wider social sciences (McDonald, 1996), as well as calls for more engagement with the humanities, both in organizational research (Zald, 1993) and the business school curriculum (Colby et al., 2011). As a historian Sewell (2005: 358) sees the ‘emergence of the diachronic metaphor of social construction’ as a manifestation of an historic, or ‘historical turn’ within social science. He cites the example of Giddens’ (1984) ‘move from the problematic of structure, synchronically understood, to that of the diachronic process of . . . “structuration”‘ (Sewell, 2005: 358). This is reflected in organization studies with the rise of more explicitly social constructionist theories, in particular new institutionalism (Powell and DiMaggio, 2012), in which several foundational studies are based on longitudinal (e.g. Fligstein, 1991) or archival research (DiMaggio, 1991). However, the ontological and methodological shift away from the synchronic excess of structural contingency theory and the reduced reliance on cross sectional correlations does not necessarily represent a conscious turn towards history.