Towards a more inclusive business history: The erasure of Madeleine Parent (1918-2012).

Abstract

This paper sets out to accomplish three things: introduce Madeleine Parent (1918-2012) as a key but neglected figure in the development of management thought and practice in Canada; offer a novel and highly digestible narrative which is persuasive and powerful and challenges conventional approaches to historical writing, and finally, to levy a critique on the field itself which saw fit to ignore a key player in management and organizational studies in Canada. This paper features a novel methodology called ficto-feminism, which combines aspects of collective biography, auto-ethnography and fictocriticism. Ficto-feminism is an onto-epistemological feminist approach to critical historiography which uses literary strategies and the political utility of polemics to create alternative historical account. This account challenges management history to be more inclusive of not only neglected figures, but also overlooked practices and novel approaches to research.