Writing business history: creating narratives Andrew Popp* (University of Liverpool) and Susanna Fellman (University of Gothenburg) Abstract: In this article we examine business history’s relationship to narrative history writing. In so doing we respond to the call for paper’s question: ‘storytelling vs. business history: do business historians create narratives and in what ways?’ We survey attitudes in business history to narrative history writing, the relationship between archive, narrative, and historical knowledge claims, and the importance of writing practices and qualities. We report the results of interviews with practicing business historians and conclude that whilst the discipline has an ambiguous relationship with narratives and narrative history writing, there is a recognition that all historians are to an extent engaged in the construction of narratives, whenever they write. We argue that a re-engagement with narrative history writing might provide a way of resolving a current epistemological impasse between realist and interpretivist positions. Ultimately, any narrative turn in
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Writing business history: creating narratives
Andrew Popp* (University of Liverpool) and Susanna Fellman (University of
Gothenburg)
Abstract:
In this article we examine business history’s relationship to narrative history writing. In so
doing we respond to the call for paper’s question: ‘storytelling vs. business history: do business
historians create narratives and in what ways?’ We survey attitudes in business history to
narrative history writing, the relationship between archive, narrative, and historical knowledge
claims, and the importance of writing practices and qualities. We report the results of
interviews with practicing business historians and conclude that whilst the discipline has an
ambiguous relationship with narratives and narrative history writing, there is a recognition that
all historians are to an extent engaged in the construction of narratives, whenever they write.
We argue that a re-engagement with narrative history writing might provide a way of resolving
a current epistemological impasse between realist and interpretivist positions. Ultimately, any
narrative turn in business history will be incomplete without an examination of the status of
Adrian rejects the realism of Toms and Wilson; ‘there are,’ he says ‘varieties of realism
and it does not have to be this way’.57 Adrian sees the stark dichotomy between realist,
narrative business history on the one hand and interpretive, non-narrative business
history on the other as no longer tenable. This is a key insight that will drive forward
our discussion and the implications that we believe can be drawn from this study.
Discussion and conclusion: reflecting on narratives
Narrativization places a new value on narratives as constructed, constitutive, and sense-
making. That perspective should be extended to our own writing as business historians.
We began with three core questions: how do business historians view the relationship
between archive and narrative; how do narratives relate to business historical
knowledge; how important is writing in business history? Behind these questions lay
more a fundamental question; is business history ready to embrace all dimensions of a
narrative turn? We believe the narrative turn should extend to narrative as both method
and subject.
Business history displays, at best, an ambivalent relationship to narrative history
writing, and the broader field of history. Narrative is often distrusted as atheoretical.
Business historians are now much less likely to write company histories, a genre in
which a chronological narrative is an obvious solution to issues of structure. Literary
qualities, compared to explicit theoretical frameworks, have become less central to the
consideration of what constitutes ‘good’ business history. In Europe at least, closer
alignment with the management sciences is intensifying these shifts. Journal articles are
also now more likely to be structured around a theme than a case study, reducing the
scope for narrative. Explicit narrative elements are often brief and descriptive, aimed at
providing context before the work of conceptualization begins.
Nonetheless, it is clear that some business historians do grapple with how to
write analytical narratives and the relationship between their research, the texts they
write and what it is they hope to claim. In the face of the challenges outlined above
some business historians retain a commitment to narrative forms, combined with a
regard for ‘good writing’ and a recognition that the archive is a complex place, not a
straightforward repository of records and facts. Our interviewees believe that any
narrative apparently contained in the archive is to be distrusted and upended. A
naturally corollary of these beliefs is that they are actively engaged in making historical
narratives. They recognize that storying and sense-making result not only from
analytical rigour or the application of theoretical frameworks but also from and through
complex, iterative, even intuitive processes that unfold at multiple times and places,
including at the writing desk. For all of them, storying and the narrative form are
largely indivisible from sense-making and knowledge creation. Critically, sense-
making occurs, at least in part, through the act of writing. Writing emerges as a
difficult, but extremely important process, one through which much of their thinking
takes place and during which much of the construction of the narrative takes shape. It is
also a period when they feel creative. The writing process can be gratifying, enjoyable,
and even invigorating. Writing ‘matters,’ and to what we say, not simply how we say it.
If this is the case then we believe there would be value for business historians in
thinking more explicitly about historical knowledge, truth claims, and their relationship
to both the archive and practice(s) of writing. We believe that historical knowledge is
not only located in the archive but also resides in and is expressed in our texts, whether
or not they are presented as narratives. This also makes us as (business) historians
crucial in the production of historical knowledge. A more deliberate and thoroughgoing
engagement with these issues would leave business history better placed to justify its
methods, its forms, and its claims.
Specifically, we believe that this article has two important implications, one
internal to the discipline and one external. First, in the context of the call for a narrative
turn, we urge business historians to deliberately re-engage with (multiple forms of)
narrative history writing. An epistemologically-informed use of narrative as a distinct
and legitimate form of historical knowledge might help business history negotiate the
realist and interpretivist stances between which it is currently awkwardly divided,
satisfying neither completely. Developing the language and tools to talk cogently about
narrative history writing as a valid and analytically rigorous epistemology can help the
discipline escape the trap into which it has fallen of seeing realist and interpretivist
positions as always and inviolably dichotomous. Critically, narratives are not simply
naïve, realist chronicles but nor does their constructed, interpretive nature render them
devoid of rigour or solidity. Finding the language and tools for this dialogue need not
encourage homogeneity but could instead support a more harmonious pluralism in
which those operating from different traditions within the discipline are better able to
converse and to read one another’s work. We view this article as taking a step towards
opening that dialogue by showing the centrality of these issues for a small sample of
business historians. The intention is not to demonstrate representativeness but
possibilities.
Such a dialogue might be advanced through a genuine re-engagement with the
broad field of historical studies, where numerous analytical tools, methods, and forms
of narrative writing – as well, of course, as advanced work in historiography and the
philosophy of history – are available. The narrative turn in business history can be
further advanced through a greater reflexivity with regard to the narratives we write and
how we write them, a reflexivity that complements the move to take narratives about
business as apt subjects of study.
It is not our intention to prescribe the forms that reflexivity should take; instead
we explore what might be gained through one concrete example, a paper exploring
entrepreneurship in early nineteenth-century Britain.58 In this work the authors
purposefully employed a tactic of twice telling the same ‘story’ from two different
perspectives. The purpose of this double-narration, which was motivated by an
encounter with sources that revealed their ‘sheer resistance to explanation, if by
explanation is meant an unfolding – ex plans – of a biographical life’, is not to
demonstrate that either one narrative or the other is ‘wrong’: instead it is, at least in
part, to reveal the constructed and contingent qualities of both narratives. In the gap that
opens between them we see that ‘the more we seek to narrate and thus theorize on these
conditions the more the [our subjects are] … placed in a derivative role’.59 If this seems
a pessimistic view – that to narrate is to negate – then the point is missed. Rather it is
argue for an explicit acknowledgement of the ‘intellectual conceit of narratives that find
in human lives something with plot’.60 That, too, is our purpose here.
But business historians do not speak only to each other or to other historians. As
we have several times indicated, business historians, especially those located in Europe,
where they are more likely to be employed by a business school, increasingly seek to
speak also to management scientists, organizational theorists, and a host of other social
scientists. In that context, to recommend a turn to explicitly narrative history writing
derived from a turn to history and historiography might seem counter-intuitive, willful,
or even self-destructive. However, we believe that this need not be the case. Hence we
turn to our second implication, one concerned with relations external to the borders of
the discipline.
Currently, business historians seeking a dialogue with scholars beyond the
boundary of the sub and parent discipline often struggle to make themselves understood
and to succeed in publishing in leading management and organizational studies
journals. This is not because they study irrelevant or uninteresting topics but because
their sources, methods, and genres are all alien, sometimes even distrusted.
Once again, as with the internal dialogue discussed above, business historians
wishing to rehabilitate narrative history writing have been caught in a trap. For highly
scientistic scholars, occupying the mainstream of management studies, the apparently
‘found’ nature of business historians’ sources renders them almost mere anecdotalists
and certainly not real social scientists. For more constructivist social scientists, such as
those interested in narratives and narrativization (who study narratives but rarely write
them), the same apparently found quality of business historians’ sources, coupled with
a reluctance to explicate the epistemological status of the texts they go on to write and
an unfamiliar genre of writing, casts an unmistakable shade of naive objectivism over
business history. And for both camps these doubts can be complicated by a nagging
suspicion that historians are condemned by the nature of their sources to imposing
naturalized but nonetheless constructed narrative structures on to the past – a slight of
hand they then refuse to admit.
It is only through an explicit engagement with (and acknowledgement of) the
questions raised here about how narratives are constructed that it will be possible to
begin to answer and allay the doubts held by those outside the discipline. We will be
better positioned to explain the genesis and foundation of the epistemological claims
that can be made for and through narrative history writing. The narrative turn in the
social sciences has already persuaded many that narratives can and should be studied as
constitutive. We should, as a discipline, be able to explain that the narratives we write
are equally constitutive – that is thought-forming and thus analytical. Engagement with
these questions should begin with reflecting on and talking about current practices in
business history writing, as we have done here.
1Notes
Hansen, “Business History,” 709–710 and 697.2 Decker, “The Silence of the Archive,” 6.3 Lipartito, “Connecting the Cultural and the Material,” 704.4 White, Metahistory; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative.5 Kobrak and Schneider, “Varieties of Business History”; Decker, “The Silence of the Archives”; Schwarzkopf, “What is an Archive”; Fellman and Popp, “Lost in the Archive”.6 Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, “Research Strategies for Organizational History,” 251.7 Fellman and Popp, “Lost in the Archive”.8 Throughout we use the term ‘the archive’ but recognize that business historians rely on an increasingly large range of sources, many of them not found in archives as conventionally understood. Whilst recognizing the complexities involved we use ‘the archive’ as shorthand for the sources on which we rely in constructing our narratives. It may be that the characteristics of different types of sources subtly imprint themselves on the process of narrative construction but teasing out those effects is beyond the scope of this paper.9 William, one of our respondents, described this as the ‘inducto-deductive cycle … a process of refinement … [and] understanding.’ Fellman and Popp, “Lost in the Archive,” 218 and 240.10 Munslow, Narrative and History: 24.11 Decker, “The Silence of the Archive,” 612 Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives,” 132, 133, and 135.13 Burton, Archive Stories: 2.14 Steedman, “The Space of Memory”.15 Trouillot, Silencing the Past.16 Wake, “Writing from the Archive”.17 Steedman, “The Space of Memory”.18 Clark and Rowlinson, “The Treatment of History”.19 Hansen and Wadhwani, “Can Business History and Anthropology Learn from Each Other?”20 Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, “Research Strategies for Organizational History,” 251.21 Sachs, “Letters to a Tenured Historian”.22 Keulen and Kroeze, “Understanding Management Gurus,” 177.23 White, Metahistory.24 White, “The Value of Narrative,” 5.25 Ritter, “Archival Research”.26 Coleman, “Uses and Abuses,” 149 and 15427 Pope, “Business History and Business Anthrolpology,” 71.28 Coleman, “Uses and Abuses”, 149 and 151.29 Coleman, “Uses and Abuses”, 154.30 De Jong, A. and D. Higgins, “New Business History?,” 2. Emphasis added.31 Toms and Wilson, “In Defence of Business History,” 111.32 Lipartito, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” 4.33 Foote, quoted in Sachs, “Letters to a Tenured Historian,” 31.34 Kroeze and Keulen, “Leading a Multinational,” 1266 and 1270.35 Kroeze and Keulen, “Leading a Multinational,” 1268 and 1266.36 For example in the scholarly journal Rethinking history, there have been special issues on History as Creative Writing.37 Toms and Wilson, “In Defence of Business History”; Amatori, “Business History as History”.38 Pihlainen, “Realist Histories?,” 177.39 Pihlainen, “Realist Histories?,” 178.40 Kobrak and Schneider, “Varieties of Business History,” 402 and 401.41 Kobrak and Schneider, “Varieties of Business History,” 402.42 Kobrak and Schneider, “Varieties of Business History,” 404, 406, and 407
43 Kobrak and Schneider, “Varieties of Business History,” 411.44 Hansen, “Business History”.45 Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, “Research Strategies for Organizational History”.46 Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, “Research Strategies for Organizational History,” 253.47 Toms and Wilson, “In Defence of Business History”.48 Lipartito, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” 4.49 McNeill, “Trust and Professional Identity”.50 Lipartito, “Connecting the Cultural and the Material,” 288.51 Fellman and Popp, “Lost in the Archive”.52 Fellman and Popp, “Lost in the Archive”.53 Goodman, “Editorial: History as Creative Writing”.54 Heehs, “Shaped like themselves,” 27.55 Powell, “Dreaming Charles Eastman,” 115.56 Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, “Research Strategies for Organizational History”.57 Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, “Research Strategies for Organizational History”; Toms and Wilson, “In Defence of Business History”.58 Popp and Holt, “The Presence of Entrepreneurial Opportunity”.59 Popp and Holt, “The Presence of Entrepreneurial Opportunity,” 66 and 64.60 Popp and Holt, “The Presence of Entrepreneurial Opportunity,” 66.
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