Tales in the manufacture of knowledge: Writing a company history of Pan American World Airways

Abstract

The strength of historical accounts of organizations has been their ability to present the development of a particular company or companies in an apparently seamless, linear and concrete fashion (Rowlinson 2004). Recent academic literature on the subject has approached popular and conventional manners of writing company histories with much skepticism, questioning the particular nature and privileged status of knowledge produced in such accounts. Specifically, it has been suggested that understanding the intent of central historical actors, as well as grounding cultural accounts of company histories in the circumstances of their production can aid in a more holistic and in some cases plural (Boje 1995) understanding of the content of the history (Gillespie 1991; Rowlinson 2004). This paper begins with a review of the current literature on company histories in which two commonly discussed perspectives are outlined and discussed.We first argue that missing from the current perspectives of crafting company histories is an understanding of how the socio-political context in which the company history is crafted comes to influence the actual story told or knowledge produced about the company history. Second, it is suggested that a use of Actor-Network Theory or ANT (Latour 1987) may provide some useful insights as to the socio-political process of writing company histories and the influence of these processes on the nature of knowledge produced. Due to the emphasis on performativity in ANT (Law 1992), the third section of this paper extends the first two sections empirically by drawing on materials from the Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) archive at the University of Miami’s Otto Richter Library.1 Through a presentation of the political process of writing a company history of Pan Am, ANT is used to show how the actors involved in crafting the company history negotiate and craft what is now a privileged and taken for granted ‘factual’ company history. Finally, it is proposed that the strength of our approach lies in a recasting of company histories as created and crafted through the negotiated ‘ordering’ (Law 1994) of story-tellers.