Re-visiting the historic turn 10 years later: current debates in management and organizational history – an introduction

Abstract

The establishment of Management & Organizational History (MOH) emerged out of earlier calls for a ‘historic turn’ in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) and a (somewhat mooted) critique of existing approaches to the study of history in the field. While MOS was seen as universalist, presentist, and scientistic, attempts at historical analysis were seen by some, in the words of Alfred Kieser, as generally “myopic fact collecting without a method.” The inaugural editorial of Management & Organizational History went on to call for greater exploration of the different methodological (and philosophical) approaches to the study of history. Central to the first issue of MOH was a renewed call for a ‘historic turn.’ Ten years later, there is some question if the ‘historic turn’ has been fully realized or even adequately conceptualized. Nonetheless, a growing consensus around the need for a historical turn has arguably served to paper over some potentially significant differences and debates. In this special issue, we revisit the idea and progress of the notion of the historic turn in MOS through the eight contributing articles. We frame our discussion of the papers through a focus on the notion of the historic turn itself, the issue of critically rethinking MOS from an historical perspective, new turns and developments, MOH and contemporary thinking about the past and history, the performance of history, polyphonic constitutive historicism, fusions of methods and theoretical framing, and tales from the field.