Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods

Why does history matter to our understanding of management, organizations, and markets? What theoretical insights can it offer into organizational processes? How can scholars use historical sources and methods to address research questions in management and organization studies?

This book brings together leading organization scholars and business historians to examine the opportunities and challenges of incorporating historical research into the study of firms and markets. It examines the reasons for the growing interest in historically grounded research in management departments and business schools, and considers both the intellectual and practical questions the endeavour faces. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part, History and Organization Theory, considers the relationship between historical reasoning and key theoretical schools of organizational thought, including institutional theory, evolutionary theory, and critical theory. The second part, Actors and Markets, considers how historical perspective can provide researchers with insights into organizational change, entrepreneurial processes, industry emergence, and the co-evolution of states and markets. In the final section, Sources and Methods, the contributors explicate historical methodologies within the context of other approaches to studying organizations and provide concrete suggestions for researchers in the field. The introduction contextualizes these issues within the broader context of developments in the fields of business history and organization studies, and orients readers to the 'future of the past in management and organization studies.'

Marcelo Bucheli, Associate Professor of Business and History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,R. Daniel Wadhwani, Fletcher Jones Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship & Management, University of the Pacific

Marcelo Bucheli is Associate Professor of Business and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a visiting scholar at the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) in 2013 and held the Harvard-Newcomen fellowship in business history at Harvard Business School in 2004-2005. He earned his PhD in history at Stanford University and has a BS and MA in economics from the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). He won the 2004 Business History Review best article award, the 2009 Petroleum History Institute best article award, and the 2011 Mira Wilkins award in international business history.


R. Daniel Wadhwani is Fletcher Jones Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at the University of the Pacific. He has held visiting positions at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), the University of Toulouse (France), and Zhejiang University (China), and was the 2003 Harvard-Newcomen fellow in business history at Harvard Business School. He earned his PhD from University of Pennsylvania and his BA from Yale University, both in history. He has published in leading journals in both business history and management and his work has won the Henrietta Larson Award in business history and the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Best Conceptual Paper Award, among other recognitions.