Theories Practices

Dr. Adrian R. BaileyUniversity of Exeter Business School

a.r.bailey@exeter.ac.uk

Accessing historical business narratives using primary and secondary sources:

• How do we gain access to historical business narratives?• How does our mode of access impact the narratives we construct?• Narratives can provide more adequate access to the poetics and

emotions of human life, but how do we represent embodied knowledge in research reportage?

• How do we report narratives in published form?• How do we trace the construction of management knowledges using

narrative approaches?

Accessing historical business narratives using primary and secondary sources:

Adrian’s research CV

PhD ‘Constructing a Model Community: Institutions, paternalism and social identities in Bournville 1879-1939’

Leverhulme ‘The Role of Methodism in Cornish Cultures, c.1830-1930’.

AHRC ‘Reconstructing Consumer Landscapes c.1947-1975: Shopper reactions to the supermarket in early post-war England’

ESRC ‘Internationalization and Innovation in the Service Sector: the role of international migration and UK (London) hotels’

Accessing historical business narratives using primary and secondary sources:

• Archival methods– Written texts and Images

• Interviews– Structured / Semi-structured

• Oral histories• Witness groups• Material cultures

– Landscapes and architecture as text

•Virtual Texts– Fiction in many forms e.g. novels, poetry, film.

• Embodied performance– Accessed through ethnographic methods and other sources mentioned

above.

Key Issues in Historical Narrative

The ambiguity of history• The totality of past human actions (obj. science)• The narrative we construct about past human actions (subj. craft)• Representations of the past are corrigible (methods are vital), yet history is a

socially and culturally embedded practice.• Therefore, reflexivity becomes an important part of establishing the adequacy

of our historical interpretations.

Reflexivity (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000; Bailey et al 2009)• The interpretation of interpretations• How do you assess the difference between ways of thinking about knowledge

(i.e. theory) and ways of doing knowledge (method)• Issues of disciplinary position and authority• Show how to we gain access to the place of speaking for the other?• Good to be committed to several theoretical positions, so that the empirical

can find a home without subjecting it to narrow categorical imperatives.

Key Issues in Historical Narrative

Research in post-ethnographic culture

• Cultures have always produced texts about themselves, but postmodern culture is highly reflexive and takes this production to new extremes (Bailey & Bryson 2006; John Dorst 1989).

• There is an increasing reliance on texts as mediators of ‘truths’, rather than the embedded and embodied historical and geographical relationships in which stories are learnt and exchanged

• Therefore we have to pay much more attention to reflexivity, which means attention to Historiography: the history of histories.

Key Issues in Historical Narrative

Call for an historical turn in organisation studies? Clark and Rowlinson (2004)

• Move from rationalist scientific approaches to the organisation

• Move away from ‘Heathrow Organisation Theory’ (de-contextualised use of history)

Barriers to historiographical research• Threat to authoritarian pedagogical capital

• View that people do things, not stories.

Cadbury Business HistoryCustomer Integrated Marketing Strategy

1879-1939

Narrative Typologies:

Type of Narrative Characteristics

Ontological Situate personal identity and existential meanings

Public Institutional and collective stories

Conceptual Theoretical stories used to ground ontological and public narratives (i.e. structuration theory)

Meta Pre-suppositional stories that organise a world view or storytelling universe.

Source: Somers and Graham (1994)

Customer Integrated Marketing Strategy1879-1939

Dominant Public Narrative (Hagiography)

Benevolent family legacy; Heroic founders, Innovators, Ethical management (Quakerism), Environmentally responsible, Corporate welfare.

Vehicles of the Narrative

1900s - Journalism and Press Statements

1902 – Factory in a Garden

1902 – The Bournville Works Magazine

1906 - Richard Cadbury of Birmingham

1923 – The Life of George Cadbury

1931 – The Firm of Cadbury: 1831-1931

Dominant Public Narrative

Yet throughout the century of progress and change there have been unity - a unity brought about because during the whole period the business has been the daily personal concern of a family that has steadily tried to apply, as an employer of labour, the principles of its Quaker faith (Williams 1931, 259).

Bournville Factory 1879, showing location of first Quaker meeting X

Narrative of Managerialism

1879-1899 Strong paternalism ~ religious work ethos

1900-1919 Soft paternalism ~ emerging managerialism

1920-1939 Weak paternalism ~ deepening managerialism

Very different public narratives were circulating during these three time periods, but the dominant myths associated with the early period glossed contestations of Cadbury management in the later periods.

Dominant Conceptual Narratives (Relatively un-reflexive academic histories for

the period 1879-1939)

Dominant Conceptual Narratives (Un-reflexive academic histories)• Planning histories (Bournville as a lived space ignored)• Conservative reading of the dominant public narrative of the

benevolent firm and progressive management structures.

Bailey’s (2002) alternative set of narratives

(generating a set of reflexive academic histories)• Fordism (Regulation School approaches to political economy)

• Domesticity (Feminist theories of patriarchal business culture)

• Imperialism (Post-colonial theories)

• Protestantism (Cultural Turn in business history)

• Rational Recreation (Critiques of modernity & diffusion of bureaucracy e.g. Sennett, MacIntyre, Weber)

Cadbury Business HistoryCustomer Integrated Marketing Strategy

1879-1939

Deconstructing a tradition that has endured to include voices from the margins of the workforce and local resident community.

‘The City’: Virtual Narratives

1980s London becomes increasingly visible:• London as a story of deregulated finance and flows• Booming financial services industry• Meritocratic private business coalitions

Culture industries develop the narrative of the New Britain• Serious Money (1987), Capital City, Nice Work (1988)• Conscious of wealth, ignorant of egalitarian concerns• Bonus culture• Conspicuous consumption – • The abstract community of money turned into the community of the moneyed

Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N.J. (1992) In the wake of money. The City of London and the accumulation of value, in Budd, L. and Whimster, S. (eds), Global Finance and Urban Living, Routledge, London, 282-311

Key Issues in Historical Narrative

Moral Embeddedness of History

“Managers themselves and most writers about management conceive of themselves as morally neutral characters whose skills enable them to devise the most efficient means of achieving whatever end is proposed. Whether a given manager is effective or not is on the dominant view a quite different question from that of the morality of the ends which his effectiveness serves or fails to serve.”

See: MacIntyre (1985, 74)

Key Issues in Historical Narrative

Moral Embeddedness of History• Narrative and ethics are inseparable• Adopting an historical approach to business narratives leads us to

consider the contingency of how decisions could have been otherwise.

• History is selective and historical selections cannot form the proofs that theory demands from history.

• History is corrigible and evidence of methodology is an important part of demonstrating reliability.

• Methodology is rarely reported in academic literature – except the PhD! Is this good practice?

• In Organisational studies is history ignored to protect the pedagogical authority of the case study?

BibliographyAlvesson, M. and Sköldberg, K. (2000) Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research,

Sage, LondonBailey, A.R. (2002) Constructing a model community: institutions, paternalism and social identity in

Bournville, 1879-1939, PhD thesis (University of Birmingham)Bailey, A. R., Brace, C. and Harvey, D. C. (2009) ‘Three Geographers in an Archive: positions,

predilections and passing comment on transient lives, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34, 254-269

Bailey, A. R. and Bryson, J. R., (2006) ‘Stories of suburbia (Bournville, UK): from planning to people tales’, Social and Cultural Geography, 7, 179-198

Dorst, J. (1989) The Written Suburb: An American Site, An Ethnographic Dilemma, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia

Elias, N. and Scotson, J.L. (1965) The Established and the Outsiders, Frank Cass, LondonMacIntyre, A. (1985) After Virtue (Second Edition), Duckworth, London. Rowlinson, M. (1988) The Early Application of Scientific Management by Cadbury, Business History,

30, 377-395Peter Clark and Michael Rowlinson (2004) The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards

an ‘Historic Turn’?, Business History, 46(3), 331-352Rowlinson, M. and Hassard, J. (1993) The Invention of Corporate Culture: A History of the Histories

of Cadbury, Human Relations, 46(3), 299-326Somers, M.R. and Graham, G.D. (1994) Reclaiming the Epistemology “Other”: Narrative and the

Social Constitution of Identity, in Callhoun, C. (ed) Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Blackwell, Oxford, 37- 99