The Future of the Past in Management and Organization Studies

This chapter examines the opportunities and challenges presented by the incorporation of historical research and reasoning into management and organizational studies, and argues that the value of history lies in its ability to offer unique perspectives on management, organizations, and markets, rather than in providing a longitudinal version of social scientific explanations. Researchers interested in the use of history will need to recognize its distinct epistemic assumptions and its employment of a retrospective viewpoint to understand organizational behavior and cognition, and to understand the particular methodological approaches the historical perspective entails. The chapter introduces these issues and examines them against the backdrop of growing interest in the use of historical evidence and reasoning to study organizations. It introduces the essays contained in the collected volume Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods and frames them in relationship to the broad topic of historical methods in organizational research.