Management History Research Group

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME – Draft programme now available (click link below):

MHRG Schedule 2017 FINAL DRAFT v.2

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS – All abstracts

VENUE INFORMATION – http://www.phm.org.uk/visit-us/how-to-find-us/

PANEL ANNOUNCEMENT – The 2nd day of the conference will include a special discussion panel on contemporary and historical management of universities, featuring Professor Bill Cooke (York), Professor Thomas Docherty (Warwick), Professor Mary Evans (LSE), and Professor Stuart Jones (Manchester).

WORKSHOP KEYNOTE SPEAKERS –

Professor Hannah Barker, University of Manchester

Professor Stephen Linstead, University of York

 Workshop theme: Breakpoints, Crises and Histories of the People

“Nothing is so astounding as the vitality of the social organism – how it persists, feeding itself, clothing itself, amusing itself, in the face of the worst calamities.”

John Scott Ten Days that Shook the World, (1977: 117)

It seems increasingly commonplace for ‘everyday life’ to be framed in terms of emergency, crisis and disaster. Is the election of Donald Trump a calamity for the United States and the world? Will Brexit be a calamity for Britain? Shocks to the body politic such as financial collapses, wars, revolutions and unexpected election results invite speculation about opportunities, crises and impending disasters. ‘Hinges of history’ are supposedly swinging this way and that.

But, as John Scott above reminds us, even amid the historical breakpoint of 1917, somehow social life persists and develops. The field of social history has played a vital role in decentring the privileged narratives of ‘great white men’ of history, instead emphasizing the often hidden, silenced, or side-lined voices of ‘the people’. Recognising that ‘history is never for itself, it is always for someone’ (Jenkins, 1991/ 2003: 21), the Management History Research Group’s annual workshop will be based around the theme of ‘breakpoints, crises, and histories of the people’.

The word ‘crisis’ is derived from the Greek word krisis which variously means an unstable situation, a judgement, or a turning point in a disease. Bodies die, but the social organism often survives. What persists is remembered in the texts, documents, writings, images and constructions of social memory. The Peoples’ History Museum in Manchester is thus the ideal location for the hosting of this workshop.

The workshop will ask who or what is ‘the people’ and what is its relationship to ‘management’, especially in times of crisis? How, and in what ways, can management and the people be understood historically? Is a ‘people’s history’ (see for example Zinn, 2003) oppositional or complementary to management history? What historical, sociological, and anthropological methods can be applied to make sense of the interactions of management and the people in writing informed and reflexive historical narratives of the continuities and changes associated with crises and turning points?

The Middletown studies in Muncie, Indiana (Lynd & Lynd 1929 / 1956) or the Worktown studies of Bolton, Lancashire (see Hilton, 2008; Stanley, 2007), perhaps provide interesting examples. Both these industrial towns were deeply affected by the financial crisis of 1929 and the depression of the Thirties, prefiguring the decades of industrial ‘restructuring’ that have ravaged these towns from the 1980s to the present day. Socially-informed management history involves the intersection of numerous disciplines: business history, social history, industrial and urban sociology, and social anthropology among others.  The Management History Research Group embraces interdisciplinary approaches in what promises to be an exciting and collegial event.

The MHRG annual workshop is a friendly, economical and academically open venue for the presentation of research in the field of management history, broadly defined. Papers that relate to the workshop theme or any other topic in management history are welcome.

There are two main types of submission:

1) Full Papers of around 4,000-8,000 words, excluding references. These papers will be circulated in advance to the participants at the workshop and will be allocated longer slots in the schedule.

2) Developmental Papers/Presentations. Please submit an abstract of c.250 words, excluding references.

We also welcome expressions of interest to organize panels around specific topics; roundtables; debates; or technical / methodological panels.

We particularly encourage PhD students and those who have not attended the MHRG before to submit. The MHRG is a supportive and developmental environment for the presentation of research.

The deadline for submissions is 30 May 2017. Decisions on acceptance will be issued by 5 June 2017. Please email submissions and any queries to:

mhrg.manchester@gmail.com

Full registration fee including evening dinner on 10th July is £110. Reduced rate for PhD students and retired delegates is £65.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Kind regards

MHRG Workshop Committee

References

Hinton, J., (2008) ‘The “Class Complex”: Mass-Observation and Cultural Distinction in Pre-War Britain’, Past and Present, 199 (1): 207-236

Jenkins, K., (1991 / 2003) Re-thinking History, London: Routledge

Lynd, R.S. and Lynd, H.M. (1929 /1956) Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Scott, J., (1919 /1977) Ten Days that Shook the World, London: Penguin

Stanley, L., (2007) ‘Mass-Observation’s Fieldwork Methods’, in Atkinson et al, eds., (2007) Handbook of Ethnography, London: Sage

Zinn, H., (2003) A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present, New York: Harper & Row

Below is the text from the 2016 workshop (the call for papers for 2017 is now live)

The MHRG annual workshop is a friendly, economical and academically open venue for the presentation of research in the field of management history, broadly defined. Papers that relate to the workshop theme or any other topic in management history are welcome. This year’s venue is Kelham Island Industrial Museum, Sheffield, home to a Bessemer converter, with many welcoming amenities nearby.

There are two main types of submission:

1) Full Papers no shorter than 2,000 words, excluding references. These papers will be circulated in advance to the participants at the workshop and will be allocated longer slots in the schedule.

2) Developmental Papers/Presentations. Please submit an abstract of c.250 words, excluding references.

We also welcome expressions of interest to organize panels around specific topics; roundtables; debates; technical panels; and PechaKucha sessions (short presentations).

We particularly encourage PhD students and those who have not attended the MHRG before to submit. The MHRG is a supportive and developmental environment for the presentation of research.

The deadline for submissions is Monday 9 May. Decisions on acceptance will be issued on Friday 13 May. Please email submissions and any queries to:

mhrg.sheffield@gmail.com

Keynote addresses

The MHRG is pleased to announce that there will be two keynote addresses at this year’s workshop.

Dr Gabrielle Durepos (Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia), is an author of Anti-History: Theorizing the Past, History, and Historiography in Management and Organization Studies (Information Age Publishing, 2012) and will address ‘The Historic-turn ten years on.’

Professor Gerard Hanlon (Queen Mary, University of London) is the author of The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory (Routledge, 2015) and will address the dark-side theme of this year’s workshop.

Special Issue of Management and Organization History

The MHRG in Sheffield will also support Paper Development Workshops relating to a Special Issue of Management and Organization History. The topic for the SI is ‘Imperialism and Coloniality in Management and Organization History’, and the CFP and further information can be found here.

Workshop Venue

The workshop will be held at Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield.

Kelham Island Museum, Alma Street, Sheffield, S3 8RY

Registration

Full price registration is: £110.

Retired and PhD registration is £65.

Register here.

Accommodation

The MHRG does not arrange accommodation, but a list of possible locations to stay will be provided.

Workshop theme: Dark-side research in management and organization history

[H]istory does not resuscitate anything. But the word evokes the function allocated to a discipline that deals with death as an object of knowledge and, in doing so, causes the production of an exchange among living souls. Such is history. A play of life and death is sought in the calm telling of a tale, in the resurgence and denial of the origin, the unfolding of a dead past and result of a present practice. It reiterates, under another rule, the myths built upon a murder of an originary death and fashions out of language the forever-remnant trace of a beginning that is as impossible to recover as to forget.

 – Michel de Certeau The Writing of History (De Certeau 1988, 47).

In Management and Organization Studies dark-side research has emerged as a corrective to mainstream accounts of management and organization that have ‘placed an emphasis on the functional and pro-social aspects of [organizational] behaviour while regarding dysfunctional and antisocial norms as abnormal or extraneous and in need of correction (Linstead, Maréchal, and Griffin 2014, 166).’ This research agenda has resulted in notable contributions to both to knowledge of management and organization (Muhr and Rehn 2014; Kerr and Robinson 2012; Stokes and Gabriel 2010; Murphy and Willmott 2015) and also to management education through the dark-sides cases (Raufflet and Mills 2009; Diochon, Mills, and Raufflet 2013).

The critique of performative and uncritical versions of corporate history (Clark and Rowlinson 2004) and the development of perspectives that have allowed power relationships and reflexivity to be written into management and organization history (Durepos and Mills 2011; Durepos and Mills 2012) present the possibility, and the need, to further pursue critique within management history. The exploration of this darker-side to management history might be methodological, through an examination of the dominant paradigms of through which business history has been researched and written. It might also be empirical, to examine the ‘play of life and death’ in the histories of organization. From the social and cultural destruction wrought by imperial business (Quijano 2007; Banerjee 2008), to the corporate malfeasance that underpinned manufacture of the exploding Ford Pinto (Dowie 1977); from the practices and legacies of nineteenth century slavery (Cooke 2003), to the Global Financial Crisis (Boddy 2011); from Big Tobacco (Palazzo and Richter 2005) to the arms industry (Bitzinger 2014)- where there has been management, there has been always been a dark-side. The notion of ‘stigmatized industries’ (Vergne 2012) further problematizes conceptions of the dark-side. Are such critiques valid? How have stigmatized industries sought to legitimize themselves and their practices over time? What are the histories of managers and management within stigmatized industries?

Topics are not limited, but might include:

• The history of corporate malfeasance
• The role of business and management in creating poverty, inequality, and social and environmental degradation
• The history of Corporate Social Responsibility
• Business ethics in historical perspective
• The history of ‘stigmatized industries’
• Methodological issues and the ‘dark-side’ of writing business and management history
• Criminality, fraud and corporate crime

This consideration of the dark side is not exhaustive, and we welcome contributions with any connection to the theme. As ever, we also welcome submissions which make a more general contribution to the interests of the MHRG.

References

Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby. 2008. “Necrocapitalism.” Organization Studies 29 (12): 1541–63. doi:10.1177/0170840607096386.

Bitzinger, Richard. 2014. Towards a Brave New Arms Industry? Adelphi Pa. London and New York: Routledge.

Boddy, Clive R. 2011. “The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis.” Journal of Business Ethics 102 (2). Springer: 255–59.

Clark, Peter, and Michael Rowlinson. 2004. “The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an ‘Historic Turn’?” Business History 46 (3): 331–52. doi:10.1080/0007679042000219175.

Cooke, Bill. 2003. “The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies.” Journal of Management Studies 40 (8). Blackwell Publishing Ltd.: 1895–1918. doi:10.1046/j.1467-6486.2003.00405.x.

De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. Columbia University Press.

Diochon, Pauline Fatien, Albert J Mills, and Emmanuel Raufflet. 2013. The Dark Side 2: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing.

Dowie, Mark. 1977. Pinto Madness. Mother Jones.

Durepos, Gabrielle, and Albert J Mills. 2012. Anti-History: Theorizing the Past, History, and Historiography in Management and Organization Studies. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Durepos, Gabrielle, and Albert J. Mills. 2011. “Actor-Network Theory, ANTi-History and Critical Organizational Historiography.” Organization. doi:10.1177/1350508411420196.

Kerr, Ron, and Sarah Robinson. 2012. “From Symbolic Violence to Economic Violence: The Globalizing of the Scottish Banking Elite.” Organization Studies 33 (2): 247–66. doi:10.1177/0170840611430594.

Linstead, Stephen, Garance Maréchal, and Ricky W Griffin. 2014. “Theorizing and Researching the Dark Side of Organization.” Organization Studies 35 (2). Sage Publications: 165–88.

Muhr, Sara Louise, and Alf Rehn. 2014. “Branding Atrocity: Narrating Dark Sides and Managing Organizational Image.” Organization Studies 35 (2). Sage Publications: 209–31.

Murphy, Jonathan, and Hugh Willmott. 2015. “The Ris of the 1%: An Organizational Explanation.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 43: 25–53. doi:10.1108/S0733-558X20150000043013.

Palazzo, Guido, and Ulf Richter. 2005. “CSR Business as Usual? The Case of the Tobacco Industry.” Journal of Business Ethics 61 (4). Springer: 387–401.

Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. “Coloniality and Modernity/rationality.” Cultural Studies 21 (2-3). Taylor & Francis: 168–78.

Raufflet, Emmanuel, and Albert J Mills. 2009. The Dark Side: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing.

Stokes, Peter, and Yiannis Gabriel. 2010. “Engaging with Genocide: The Challenge for Organization and Management Studies.” Organization 17 (4). SAGE Publications: 461–80.

Vergne, Jean-Philippe. 2012. “Stigmatized Categories and Public Disapproval of Organizations : A Mixed Methods Study of the Global Arms Industry (1996 – 2007).” Academy of Management Journal 55 (5): 1027–52. doi:10.5465/amj.2010.0599.

MHRG 2016 is hosted by the Management and Organization History Research Cluster at The York Management School, University of York.