The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an ‘Historic Turn’?

There is an increasing call for an historical perspective in organisation studies. In this essay we want to assess the major research programmes in organisation studies in relation to the ‘historic turn’ that has transformed the way other branches of the social sciences and humanities ‘go about their business’. The historic turn is part of a wider transformation that is alluded to in terms such as the ‘discursive turn’, deconstruction and post-modernism. Within history itself this transformation is associated with hermeneutics, the ‘linguistic turn’, and the revival of narrative. However, we feel that the term ‘historic turn’ may prove useful in marshalling support for calls for more history, and a different approach to history, within organisation studies, rather than subsuming it under labels that do not emphasise the historical aspect. An historic turn would represent a transformation of organisation studies in at least three senses. First, it would represent a turn against the view that organisation studies should constitute a branch of the science of society. This would parallel the ‘linguistic turn’ in history, where ‘the question ‘‘how is history like and unlike fiction?’’ has replaced ‘‘how is history like and unlike science?’’ as the guiding question of metahistorical reflection’. The linguistic turn in history is an instance of the general displacement of ‘the Scientific Attitude’ by ‘the Rhetorical Attitude’. Second, as in other fields, an historic turn would involve ‘a contentious and by no means well-defined turn towards history – as past, process, context, and so on’, but not necessarily towards the most adjacent branch of history, which in the case of organisation studies would be business history. Finally, an historic turn would entail a turn to historiographical debates and historical theories of interpretation that recognise the inherent ambiguity of the term ‘history’ itself, which refers to both ‘the totality of past human actions, and . . . the narrative or account we construct of them’. This would necessitate greater reflection on the place of historical narrative in organisation studies. An argument can be made that organisation studies has already become more historical. The new institutional economics of Coasian heritage, as opposed to the old institutionalism of Veblen and Commons, has had considerable influence on the rise of organisational economics, which is certainly more historical than orthodox neoclassical economics. The resource-based view of the firm derived from Penrose and evolutionary economics, with its emphasis on path dependence,