Historical Turn Research Articles

Beyond Eurocentrism and Orientalism: Revisiting the Othering of Jews and Muslims through medieval canon law

AbstractWhile the historical turn in IR has produced significant advances in historicising both international relations and the discipline itself, the way in which the Middle Ages have been approached, studied, and referenced even in this historically-informed scholarship unwittingly works to reinforce two myths that these scholars challenge: Eurocentrism and Orientalism. The main goal of this article is to problematise the uses of the medieval that reinforce these narratives by unpacking the linguistic and conceptual constructions that underpinned the interactions between Latin Christendom and rest of the world. In doing so, it makes two closely-connected arguments: first, drawing from the abundant literature on historical sociology and Eurocentrism, it argues that we cannot understand medieval Europe, and particularly European identity-formation, without paying attention to its relations with the non-Christian world. Secondly, and most crucially, it shows that these interactions never rested on the unified idea of an ‘infidel enemy’ that seems to emanate from the IR crusading literature. Rather, an examination of the constructions of Jews and Muslims in canon law shows an extremely nuanced and varied conceptual apparatus that creates several dynamics of Othering – and consequently allows for a variety of ways of relating ranging from toleration and coexistence to conquest.

Toward polyphonic constitutive historicism: a new research agenda for management historians

Ten years after the call for a ‘historic turn,’ this paper builds on recent developments in organizational remembering scholarship to outline a new research agenda for management historians. Traditionally, management historians have focused on understanding what actually took place in the past. The research agenda for management historians proposed in this paper involves a shift in focus to understanding how perceptions of the past influence economic action in the present. This paper outlines a new methodology for management research. The paper argues that management scholars need to draw on the latest research in the field of social memory studies to ensure that our methodologies for investigation organizational remembering are polyphonic. Polyphonic research involves attempt to capture and analyze diverse voices, rather than just a single voice or just the voices of a few elite individuals within an organization. We critique much of the existing literature on how the past on organizational memory is non-polyphonic in the sense that the historical ideas of only a small number of actors are considered.

The Advantage and Disadvantage of Architectural History in the Age of History of Built Environment

SummaryDuring the 1970s an architectural historical turn took place in Sweden. The 1970s also saw the breakthrough of a changing conceptualization of architectural history under the name of history of built environment. This article discuss how the historiography of history of built environment was produced and used, primarily focussing on the literature of the undergraduate programme in preservation of built environment, established in 1978. The aim of the article is to analyse in what way the historiographical content reflected and enacted the changing conceptualization of architectural history during this time.

‘Management is the gate’ – but to where? Rethinking Robert McNamara’s ‘career lessons’

Career narratives could make a potentially valuable contribution to an ‘historic turn’ in management and organization studies. This paper provides an historical narrative on the career of Robert S. McNamara, former President of Ford, US Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the World Bank. Based on a thorough exposition and deconstruction of historiographical and journalistic sources, the paper makes two contributions. Firstly, it argues that McNamara – a major figure in the disciplines of history, politics, and security studies – has been given a somewhat superficial treatment in management history despite being one the most high-profile managers of his generation. Where McNamara appears in management literature, the discussion has typically been historically inadequate, taking a simplistic line about his actions and approach, one limited to discrediting his ‘outdated’ forms of technique or management style and paying little attention to context and historiography. Secondly, the paper notes that management and organizations have in significant ways not moved beyond the McNamara approach now condemned by management writers. Many of the fundamental imperatives of commercial and governmental organizations that impacted McNamara’s career persist today, problematizing ideological prescriptions about ‘learning lessons.’ The distancing of today’s ‘best practice leadership’ from the ‘bureaucratic’ forms of administration associated with McNamara in the 1960s is therefore more rhetorical than real; a typical manifestation of a historical business school discourse that the historic turn tries to address.

War and Words: Broken Writing and Modest Inflections of Brutality

From Henry James to Paul Celan Recent years have seen a spectacular and largely consensual historical turn in the study of modernism. Books on the cultural and political context out of which modernists writers wrote are now legion. For many, this has been experienced with a sigh of relief and a sense that the imperative of theory ─ the “linguistic turn” ─ epitomised in a dogmatic misreading of the Derridean axiom, il n’y a pas de hors-texte, has been lifted. Which implies that literary schola...

Following Old Paths or Shaping New Ones in Natura 2000 Implementation? Mapping Path Dependency in Instrument Choice

This article reviews the influence of two specific European Union (EU) laws, the Birds and Habitats Directives, on the choice of national policy instruments by Member States. Both Directives leave the choice for policy instruments to manage the sites designated under the Directives to the Member States. Using path dependency as a leading concept, this article analyses the continuity or changes in policy instruments due to the implementation of the Directives in 15 countries. This article shows that the tendency to use existing instruments to implement EU policy is limited, as in almost all countries new instruments were developed. Yet, states do tend to choose instruments from their predominant policy instrument mix and preferred implementation style to address the management requirements of the Directives. Additionally, in Central and Eastern European countries where the implementation of EU policy coincided with a process of transition to a market economy, new instruments were introduced outside the existing implementation style. The introduction of new policy instruments is the result of historical turns, domestic pressure and a shift to new modes of governance. National case studies are needed to shed more light on the interaction between EU policy and domestic factors during the process of instrument choice.

Writing Worthless men: History and the literary

My fifth novel Worthless men is based on numerous oral history recordings that I made in my mid-twenties, and is set on the home front during World War One. Nevertheless, if I had any ambitions in relation to history while writing the novel, these were only intermittently present to me, and if I was contributing to the historical turn in contemporary literature I was doing so more or less unknowingly. I might even have denied I was writing a historical novel. This essay represents a belated attempt to engage with a discourse of which I was largely unconscious at the time of writing the novel, and considers in particular the hazy issue of novelistic intention, the compositional challenges of incorporating research material into a fiction, the ethical question of the appropriation of traumatic experience, the difficulties in distinguishing fictional from historical discourse, the greater difficulty in distinguishing ‘historical fiction’ from other types of fiction, and concludes with a reconsideration of whether I have in fact written a historical novel.

Joyce's City: History, Politics, and Life in "Dubliners" by Jack Morgan

Reviewed by: Joyce's City: History, Politics, and Life in "Dubliners" by Jack Morgan David Spurr (bio) JOYCE'S CITY: HISTORY, POLITICS, AND LIFE IN "DUBLINERS," by Jack Morgan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. 186 pp. $60.00. Jack Morgan's elegant and enlightening study of Dubliners is the most recent in what appears to be a historicist turn in the study of James Joyce's early book of short stories. Looking back on the two decades that immediately preceded and followed the turn of the twenty-first century, one is struck by the extent to which the study of Dubliners was dominated by ethical and narratological readings. R. B. Kershner's Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature stressed both the performative nature of Joyce's stories and the extent to which his characters were caught within conflicting sets of discourses and ideologies.1 In 1993, Garry M. Leonard's Reading "Dubliners" Again proposed a psychonalytic perspective which focused on stylistic shifts in the stories.2 The subtitle of Tanja Vesala-Varttala's 1999 study of Dubliners, Ethical Probing of Reading, Narrative, and Textuality speaks for itself.3 Finally, Margot Norris's Suspicious Readings locates those strategies of conflict and occlusion in Joyce's stories that oblige the narrator, and even the reader, to play an interpretive role which frequently includes an ethical dimension.4 In contrast to an earlier generation of formalist readings, what all of these works have in common is the interpretation of an interplay between narrative form and the ethical implications of Joyce's fiction. Such interpretations have their roots in a long tradition; we learn lessons and make judgments about stories based on what we are told or not told about what fictional persons do or not do. What changes through the passing of time are the ethical frameworks of the lessons we draw and the judgments we make. In contrast to this preoccupation with ethical interpretations, [End Page 439] what I am calling the turn toward historicism takes the view that the deepest understanding of Joyce's first published work of fiction is to be found in the dense network of its allusions to the cultural and historical contexts of Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century. In keeping with this view, Frank Shovlin's Journey Westward: Joyce, "Dubliners" and the Literary Revival takes up such apparently marginal subjects as the role of whiskey distilleries in the Irish economy or the survival of Jacobitism into Joyce's day.5 Morgan works in the same way, proposing what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call a "thick description" of a seemingly minor incident or ritual in order to show how its meanings resonate throughout the world Joyce evokes.6 This kind of work has the virtue of bringing new and relevant historical knowledge to bear on Joyce's work. Two different readings of Joyce's story "Clay" offer a striking contrast between the ethical and historicist interpretations outlined above. Norris argues that Maria, the middle-aged, unmarried woman at the center of the story, is a victim of the class and gender ideologies that stigmatize her as an "old maid" (140), even if the narrator fails to acknowledge this designation. When, in the Hallow Eve divination game toward the end of the story, the blindfolded Maria chooses the saucer with "a soft wet substance" (D 105), Norris finds that a trick has been played on her, one which unjustly reaffirms her lowly status as an object of ridicule. In reading the same episode, Morgan is more interested in the nature of the Hallow Eve game as a vestige of pagan Irish folklore. He finds the real issue to be the attempt to reappropriate and sanitize the ritual in the name of bourgeois Catholic values. At the time when the story takes place, the augury game included saucers containing a ring, a prayer book, water, or clay—respectively symbolic of expected marriage, a religious vocation, fertility, and death. Morgan points out that the prayer book must be a late addition to the ancient Celtic practice (94). When Mrs. Donnelly scolds the next-door girls for having imported garden dirt for the death option, her attitude reflects...

The United States Armed Forces and Their “Bowl” Games From 1942 to 1967

The collective information produced by this academic pursuit supports the goal of identifying the determinants of innovation and the process of intrafirm diffusion regarding organizational innovation. The U.S. military created 111 American football “bowl” games across six continents in 18 countries and 46 host cities from 1942 to 1967. Using the historical method through an ex post facto historical institutionalism interpretive lens, this study found the U.S. Armed Forces, through the dynamic capabilities of its top officers and officials, organized “bowl” games as product innovation and used football as process innovation to manage the massive mobilization and training of men for the various war efforts of that period. Within, we discovered (a) the resolution of crisis, (b) the emergence and recruitment of leaders, (c) the creation/use of novelty, and (d) the capacity to adapt revealed the military “bowl” game phenomenon and American football existed as critical ingredients for organizational innovation and that product innovation can emerge from process innovation and vice versa to support organizational innovation. Furthermore, novelty, although identified as a product innovation, must be supported, promoted, and adapted to create and sustain the goals associated with organizational process innovation. Next, intrafirm diffusion was shown to involve and compel job specialization, imitation/emulation, forged alliances, the creation of special service positions, and the development of newsletters and other internal/external media. Finally, this work supports and recognizes the utility of the “historic turn” with respect to the ability of how history can inform and improve today’s efforts toward innovation.

Freed by the weight of history: polemic and doxography in sixteenth century Vedānta

The early sixteenth century saw a dramatic rise in the worldly fortunes and intellectual influence of Dvaita Vedānta, principally through the career of the great scholar Vyāsatīrtha (c. 1460–1539 AD). With exhaustive precision, he mapped the full range of philosophical opinion ranged against the tenets of the Dvaita system, not only dating from Madhva’s time, but stretching back to earlier Advaita and Viśiṣṭādvaita interpretations of Vedānta, as well as the views of Mīmāṃsakas, grammarians, and logicians on more general philosophical and hermeneutical topics. He broke with the practice of his forerunners in the Dvaita tradition, who made few direct references to specific authors and texts from rival traditions and directed their criticisms toward a generic and abstracted representation of a single rival tradition, Advaita Vedānta. In crafting his elaborate surveys, Vyāsatīrtha created what was in effect a systematic doxography of Advaita Vedānta, far more detailed, sophisticated, and historically sensitive than had ever yet been devised by the Advaitins themselves. Yet, while Vyāsatīrtha’s historical survey of Advaita opinion was without precedent, it was certainly not without a sequel. Quite soon after Vyāsatīrtha’s time, the first (and perhaps only) major internal historical doxography of Advaita was produced – Appayya Dīkṣita’s Śātrasiddhāntaleśasaṃgraha. Appayya was acutely conscious of Vyāsatīrtha’s work, which formed the direct target of much of his vicious anti-Dvaita polemic. He was also clearly much influenced by him, both in his treatment of specific topics and in his overall methodology. It is likely that Appayya’s own markedly ‘historical turn’ in his treatment of Advaita was at least partly inspired by Vyāsatīrtha’s pioneering efforts, and a close examination of their works does in fact reveal significant links in their construction of the history of Advaita. The historical/doxographic method displayed most dramatically in the Śāstrasiddhāntaleśasaṃgraha is evident in his other works as well. It played an important role in his remoulding of standard positions in his Alaṃkāra and Mīmāṃsā works as well as his Vedānta ones and became in succeeding generations one of the signal features of the ‘navya’ movements in all of these disciplines. Hence, among his many other accomplishments, Vyāsatīrtha may well be seen as a pioneer in the new brand of historicist scholarship that was to become one of the hallmarks of the ‘new intellectuals’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The age of ecology: a global history

Preface to the English Edition vii Acknowledgements xiv Introduction: The Green Chameleon 1 One Environmentalism before the Environmental Movement 11 1 Good Mother Nature and the Appalling Wood Shortage : The Twin Face of Nature in the Decline of the Commons 11 2 Nature in Need of Protection and Nature as Healing Power: Environmental Activism in the Nervous Age 24 3 The Desert Threatens : Environmental Fears in the Age of Crisis the New Deal and Nazi Germany 46 4 Think Big! A Charismatic Intermezzo on the Olympian Heights 61 Two The Great Chain Reaction: The Ecological Revolution in and around 1970 79 Three Networked Thinking and Practical Priorities: An Endless Interplay 114 1 On the Ecology of Ecologism 121 2 Water and the Atom 137 3 Changing Priorities: The Movement in Motion 162 Four Charismatics and Ecocrats 182 1 Spiritual Quest and Charismatic Moments 182 2 Ten Heroines Embodying Tensions in the Movement 201 3 Institutionalization, Routinization, Revitalization 237 Five A Friend Enemy or Win-Win Scenario? 259 1 From Nuclear Power to the Spotted Owl 259 2 Violence and the Green Conscience 288 3 Ecology and Economics: The Challenge of Conceptual Analogy 320 Six Ecology and the Historic Turn of 1990: From Social Justice to Climate Justice? 339 Conclusion: The Dialectic of Green Enlightenment 425 Notes 432 Index 517

Un templo para la nación española: la Basílica del Pilar (1854-1940)

Based on a long-term analysis, this paper aims to observe how the temple of Our Lady of Pilar was progressively acquiring a national character. Under favorable circumstances to the flourishing of Marian cults, Pilar’s tradition was adapting to the changing times. The open challenge by the Democratic six-year period in Spain (1868-1874) drove forward the national character of its temple. Furthermore, due to the commemoration of the Napoleon’s siege of Zaragoza and the Rif War, the Pilar took a military and historical turn. Taking into account this process, we can understand the important role played by its temple during the Franco regime.

Narratives and memory in organizations

Organizations remember through narratives and storytelling. The articles in this Special Issue explore the interface between organization studies, memory studies, and historiography. They focus on the practices for organizational remembering. Taken together, the articles explore the similarities and differences between ethnographic and historical methods for studying memory in organizations, which represents a contribution to the historic turn in organization studies.

No Way as Way: Towards a Poetics of Martial Arts Cinema

This essay explores the history and evolution of academic film studies, focusing in particular on the development of an admirably interdisciplinary branch of inquiry dedicated to exploring martial arts cinema. Beginning with the clash between the auteur theory and the development of a psycholinguistic model of film theory upon film studies’ academic entrenchment and political engagement in the 1960s and 1970s, this essay continues past the Historical Turn in the 1970s and 1980s into the Post-Theory era in the 1990s and beyond, by which time studies of martial arts cinema, thanks in large part to the ‘cultural studies intervention’, began to attract scholars from various academic disciplines, most notably cultural studies. At once diagnostic and prescriptive, this essay seeks to historically contextualize the different modes of thinking that have informed past engagements with the cinema in general while also offering a polemical metacriticism of exemplars in an effort to highlight deficiencies in the current interpretive orthodoxy informing contemporary engagements with martial arts cinema in particular. This essay endeavors to find a way to allow the larger enterprise of ‘Martial Arts Studies’ to compliment, rather than colonize and cannibalize, the study of martial arts cinema, and this polemic offers as a model for scholars both in and out of film studies a ‘poetics of martial arts cinema’ committed to dialectical, ‘alterdisciplinary’ scholarship.

Language Policy and State in Morocco: The Status of Berber

AbstractMoroccan society has had a long tradition of multilingualism. It is socially and linguistically diverse, and its cultural makeup is one of the richest in North African countries. Its strategic location at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East has made Morocco open to a variety of linguistic influences. Morocco has been invaded by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greek, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spanish, and French. All these civilizations have deeply influenced Moroccan language policy and cultural diversity. The cultural and linguistic context of Morocco is characterized by the significant use of Arabic, as well as the presence of Berber, French, Spanish, and English. Berbers are the indigenous populations of Morocco and have existed in North Africa since time immemorial. Despite its complexity, the language policy of Morocco reveals an overarching monolingualism, with the hegemony of Classical Arabic as the only official language of the country. Recently, however, language education policy in Morocco has attempted to accommodate multilingualism. The linguistic situation of Berber has taken a new twist as it has been incorporated into the realm of Moroccan schools. The new Moroccan constitution also represents a historical turn in that it has acknowledged Berber as an official language, a move that has raised several questions with regard to the real motivation behind it. Berber implementation policy was based on an entirely top‐down bureaucratic model of language policy. Moroccan policymakers and the state seem to be aware of how other dramas are playing out in Morocco and around the world as theories of multiculturalism and effects of globalization are influencing their decisions. However, this language policy encounters many hurdles, from the improvisation to lack of qualified teachers. This article is an attempt to understand the intricate diversity and plurality of Moroccan language situation and the role of the state in Berber language policy. It also examines the invisible politics behind implementing it.

History, field definition and management studies: the case of the New Deal

Purpose– The aim of this paper is threefold. First, to argue for a more historically engaged understanding of the development of management and organization studies (MOS). Second, to reveal the paradoxical character of the recent “historical turn,” through exploration of how it both questions and reinforces extant notions of the field. Third, to explore the neglect of the New Deal in MOS to illustrate not only the problem of historical engagement, but also to encourage a rethink of the paradigmatic limitations of the field and its history.Design/methodology/approach– Adopting the theory of ANTi-history, the paper conducts an analysis of historical management textbooks and formative management journals to explore how and why the New Deal has been neglected in management theory.Findings– Focussing on the New Deal raises a number of questions about the relationship between history and MOS, in particular, the definition of the field itself. Questions include the ontological character of history, context and relationalism, and the link between history and MOS, ethics, Anglo-American centredness, and the case for historical engagement.Originality/value– The paper argues for a new approach to historical understanding that encourages a revisiting of what constitutes the field of MOS; a greater awareness of and opening up to alternative (hi)stories and, thus, approaches to MOS; and a re-evaluation of phenomena such as the New Deal and other more radical ways of organizing.

Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds., The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield | Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Delia da Sousa Correa, eds., Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial

It is customary, and quite practical, to talk of critical tendencies as “turns” – the critical turn, the cultural turn, the historicist turn, and so forth. On a slightly different scale it would seem apt to talk of a new Katherine Mansfield turn, a perspective that also embraces a certain poetic justice – it is now Katherine Mansfield’s turn. After decades of sometimes condescending, often sentimental marginalisation that can be traced back to Bloomsbury snobbery, imperial and gender hierarch...

Caught in the Middle: Philosophy of Science between the Historical Turn and Formal Philosophy as Illustrated by the Program of “Kuhn Sneedified”

This article is concerned with the development of philosophy of science in the 1970s. The explanatory framework is the picture of two fundamental split-offs: the controversial establishment of history and sociology of science and of formal philosophy of science as independent disciplines, against the background of more traditional “conceptual” varieties of philosophy of science. I illustrate these developments, which finally led to somewhat “purified” versions of the respective accounts, by examining a case study, namely, that of the structuralist school, which emerged in the 1970s as an attempt to reconcile historical and formal approaches in philosophy of science. I try to explain the failure of this initial program of “Kuhn Sneedified” and its transition to a more purified formalist version, on the basis of the fact that the former attempt was caught somewhere amid the purism of conceptual, historical, and formal accounts of philosophy of science.

Positivisasi Hukum Islam di Indonesia Era Reformasi

The Islamic law in Indonesia has evolved from time to time in line with the demands of the changing history. Recently, and during the era of reformasi—it is commonly known so—the Islamic law has been progressively positivised. By this we mean the dynamics within which the Islamic law has the ability to respond to the new situation that requires the re-thinking of some of its dictums. The role of the government has equally been good; it is completely supportive of this process. This shift in direction taken by Islamic law is due to the fact that the colonial law in the country has become rotten. It is no longer able to deal with the ever-changing situations of this Muslim-majority country. This paper discusses this historic turn, and embarks on the debate concerning the advantages of the Islamic law for a Muslim country like Indonesia. The paper also links this development with the democratic system that the country has adopted. It argues that democracy does serve as a pre-condition in which a revealed law like Syari’ah can prevail.

History in Organization and Management Theory: More Than Meets the Eye

There has been a growing debate about the role of history in management research with several authors making suggestions on how to bring the two (back) together and others even highlighting the need for a “historic turn”. What we argue in this paper is that, while history was indeed sidelined by the scientization of management since the late 1950s, it started to make a comeback from the 1980s onwards and is increasingly employed in a number of research programs. We stress that the crucial question for management scholars engaging with history (or wanting to do so) is how it relates to theory. First of all, we present a systematic overview of the way history has been used—both at the micro (organizational) and macro-levels of analysis—distinguishing between what we refer to as “history to theory” and “history in theory”. In the former, we consider those research programs, such as (neo-)institutionalism, where history serves as evidence to develop, modify or test theories. In the case of “history in theory” we identify research programs where history or the past are part of the theoretical model itself as a driver or moderator, with “imprinting” as a prime example. Second, we also identify a growing number of studies that go further by displaying what we call “historical cognizance” in the sense of incorporating period effects or historical contingencies into their theorizing efforts. Finally, drawing on our broad overview, we make more specific suggestions for increasing the visibility and influence of history in organization and management theory.