Narrative approaches and business history

1. Narrative Approaches and their Applications for
Business History and Management: Opening
Remarks
Prof. Mary Rose, Prof. Gareth Shaw,
Dr Sarah Robinson
19th March 2009
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2. ESRC-AIM Workshop: Narratives, Business History and
Management
• Aims and Scope of Workshop
•Where has business history
come from?
• Interest in Narrative Approaches
– Narratives as a management discourses
– Narratives and corporate history
– Theorizing narrative identities
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3. History and Narrative
• Why does history matter to narratives and
how do narratives matter to history?
– Business history : silos or interdisciplinarity
– My own background as a business historian
– Stories through letters
– Use of oral evidence in understanding
communities of practice
– Context
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4. Paths to isolation and diversity: Business
History in US and UK 1920-2000 (2)
• Isolation a sub-discipline of what?
– History – ‘below the salt’
• ‘deadest of all historical dead ends’. (Milward, 1979:886)
• ….[One] distinguished historian from LSE described business history as a sort of applied history –‘thereby placing it below
the salt and indicating a distinction akin to that so uniquely beloved of the British between pure and applied science ‘
(Coleman, 1987: 141,145)
• Business history’s Catch 22
– Economics- assumptions neoclassical economics, cliometrics
• ‘the historical and internal dimensions of business were, by definition, eliminated from consideration. (Galambos, 2003:14)
– Business and management
• Cranfield Institute of Technology 1973 Conference of Management and business history
• Peter Mathias concluded: ‘separation of attitude, expectations and practice would prevent much fruitful business history
interplay between management specialists and business historians’.
• Neither group read each other’s research
– Economic history
• A sub discipline of a sub discipline
– At its narrative best, in Britain, business history was a sub discipline of the sub discipline economic history
and at its worst it was, ‘narrow, insular and antiquarian’. (Hannah, 1983, 165-6)
– The way forward was inter-disciplinarity but how ?
– The Chandler perspective and beyond
4

5. Alfred D.Chandler Jr, business history and
interdisciplinary research (1)
• Research Center in Entrepreneurial History during the 1950s and early
1960s
• Thomas Cochran
– Sociology of entrepreneurship
• Alfred D.Chandler Jr
– Schumpeterian innovation
– History matters
– Sociology – evolution of roles in bureaucracies
– professionalisation of management in corporations at the heart of the dynamic
innovation process
– Empirical evidence/types of firms/categories
– Relationship between Innovative strategy and business structure
• Transformed business history
– inward looking and parochial to being outward looking and creative.
– Comparative models ,development and performance
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6. My own approach to
interdisciplinarity
• Path dependence new and old
knowledge, boundary crossing
and new combinations
• Family, internal relationships,
• PhD Case study : The Gregs of conflict, external networks, history
Styal: The Rise and Decline of a as context
Family Business (1977)
• Family firms and the cotton
• Firms, Networks and Business industry, international and regional
Values: The American and British comparisons, networks, politics,
Cotton Industries since 1750 history
(2000)
• Evolutionary innovation, networks
• (With Mike Parsons) Invisible on of innovation, communities of
Everest: Innovation and the Gear knowledge, products and practice
Makers (2003)
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7. Stories in the history of business
• The history of family businesses
– The Greg’s of Quarry Bank Mill: The rise and
decline of a family business, 1780-1914
(1986)
– Family finance – business accounts
– Letters and diaries tell the story
– How to interpret
– Whose story and when?
– Context and interpretation
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8. Innovation and building
communities of practice
• Holistic approach to studying
innovation
– Designers
– Users
– Suppliers
– Testers
– Journalists
• Comparing and combining
stories
• Setting in historical and
personal context
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9. Current projects using narrative
approaches
• Coming of the supermarket (AHRC) large
scale oral history of consumer responses
to an innovation.
• Innovation in the hotel industry (ESRC-
AIM) Large scale survey of management
and innovation.

10. 1. Narratives as Management
Discourses
• Narratives increasingly important in
locating and discussing storied accounts
(Barry and Elmes 1997)
– Exploration of strategic management importance of
‘devices’ in helping to add credibility to organisational
strategies
– Materiality, voice, perspective, ordering, setting and
readership setting

11. 2. Narratives and Corporate
History
• Managers and decision-makers as
historians
• Rowlinson and Clark’s (2007) work on:
– Symbolism of corporate history
– Counterfactual narratives
– Charting historical narratives
• Argue corporate history can contribute to
knowledge – base of business
organisations
• Notions of ‘corporate amnesia’ (Kransdorf
1998)

12. 3. Theorizing Narrative
Identities
• Organisations as storytelling milleu (Brown
2006) – sees organisations as ‘discursive
space’
• Voices constantly jostle with each other for
narrative control
– Voice
– Multiple understanding of stories
– Temporality
– fictionality

13. Basic Characteristics of
Narratives
1. Accounts of characters and selective events over time (beginning,
middle and end)
2. Retrospective interpretations of events from a particular
perspective
3. Focus on intention and action – those of the narrator and others
4. Part of the process of constructing identity (self-in relation to
others)
5. Co-authored by narrator and audience
(Ospina and Dodge 2005)

14. Some thoughts from my own research experience
1. Why use narrative research in management and
business research?
2. Issues I grappled with: theoretical to practical
3. Methodological challenges:
collection, identification and analysis
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15. The Accidental Tourist
• ‘I did not set out to collect stories or
deliberately to ask people to tell stories but
started to notice that the interviews were
full of stories’ (Robinson 2005)
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16. 1. Why use narrative approaches in
management research?
• Narrative is a powerful means by which people
describe their lives and communicate their
experiences to others:
• ‘We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative,
remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe,
doubt, plan revise, criticize, construct, gossip,
learn, hate and love by narrative’ (Hardy 1968 in
Gergen 1999:70).
• We live ‘storied lives’ Finnegan (1997:78)
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17. • Narrative also evolves out of attempts to make
sense of our experiences
• ‘We understand our own lives – our own selves
our own places in the world – by interpreting our
lives as if they were narratives, or, more
precisely, through the work of interpreting our
lives we turn them into narratives, and life
understood as narrative constitutes self-
understanding.’ Ricoeur (in Simms 2003:80)
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18. From a research perspective then…
• Narratives can be seen as a way into people’s experiences and their
sense of identity in that ‘narratives are a primary embodiment of our
understanding of the world, of experience, and ultimately of
ourselves’ (Kerby 1991:3).
• They are a resource we can use to let others see a (selected) slice
of our lives.
• ‘culturally developed resources which - like language – people can
draw on, manipulate and enact in the creation and experience of
their storied lives’ (Finnegan 1997:78).
• Narrative can be used to make sense of the ‘flowing soup’ of our
everyday experiences and to identify and navigate and link islands
of meaning
• The ability of narrative to ‘construct meaningful totalities out of
scattered events’ (Ricoeur 1981:279). 18

19. 2. Issues I grappled with
• Story or narrative?
• Often used interchangeably.
• But some writers make specific distinctions
between them.
• According to Boje (2001), story is ‘ante’ to
narrative – story is an open account of incidents
or events, but narrative comes after and adds
‘plot’ and ‘coherence’ to the story-line.
• A ‘fondness’ for stories – acceptable?
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20. A working definition….
• ‘A story describes a sequence of actions and
experiences done or undergone by a certain number of
people, whether real or imaginary. These people are
presented either in situations that change or as reacting
to such change. In turn these changes reveal hidden
aspects of the situation and the people involved, and
engender a new predicament which calls for thought,
action or both. This response to the new situation leads
the story to its conclusion.’
(Gallie1968:22 in Ricoeur 1984:150):
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21. 3. Methodological challenges:
collection, identification and analysis
• Didn’t set out to do narrative research
• Abandoned interview schedule
• Issue of formality - both the participants and myself were
more relaxed.
• The interviews were less formal and more ‘storied’:
participants took time in describing their experiences,
using stories and anecdotes to illustrate their points
• Critical incidents’ (Flanagan 1957 in Easterby-Smith et
al. 1991) or ‘moments of crisis’ (Fairclough 1992), where
I asked students to describe incidents which had
particularly affected them in some way
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22. Identification and selection
• I agree with Boje (2001) that sequence is important in making a
story.
• But disfluent speech, by lack of rehearsal, or by shyness, lack of
confidence in the language in which the story is being narrated.
• Some stories jumped out at me, some needed several readings until
I saw their ‘storied’ qualities.
• Relied on an intuitive identification of stories, some pieces
appearing more ‘storied’ than others.
• Native speakers of English, where the tone was fluent, the imagery
marked and the story-telling conventions were easily recognisable
because these speakers were using (what for me were) culturally
recognisable signs of storytelling.
• I made a conscious effort to look for different forms of story-telling
and to re-read disfluent speech for storied fragments
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23. Neil’s story: The ‘employability factor’
‘So I mean it came to the point as well umm to be honest with you I
was slightly disillusioned with my employer as well so again looking
either to move out and again in my particular profession in many
ways it is perceived that I was working for the vanguard of ELT so
again where do you go? - reassess a little bit and then you try and
particularly and if its not human err if its not dealing with people its
more dealing with change and again I saw many examples of this
thinking how can we do this? I’m in a international environment I’ve
got quite a lot of experience working with different cultures and
again try to build on those that knowledge base that you have and
expand in a way that is vocationally err true and the fact is as well
that the MBA for myself at 34 I’m thinking at the end of it if I did a
Masters in HRM how how easy would it be to convince employers
with a MA in HRM or an MA in another discipline? Whereas the
MBA employability factor its so you know people say people always
comment on MBAs it’s taken for granted that you’ll get a job I don’t
necessarily share that but its handy.’
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24. Analysis of stories
• Concerns about the use of theme analysis
for ‘bundling’, ‘stacking’, ‘counting’ stories
and placing them in ‘theme taxonomies’
(Boje 2001:125)
• Led me towards a Hermeneutic approach
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25. References
Barry, D. and Elmes, M (1997) ‘Strategy
Retold: Towards a Narrative View of
Strategic Discourse’, Academy of
Management Review 22 (2): 429-452
Brown, A.D. (2006) ‘Collective Identities’
Journal of Management Studies
Kransdorf, ? (1998) Corporate Amensia:
Keeping Know-How in the Company 25

26. Ospina, S.M. and Dodge, J. (2005), It’s
About Time: Catching Method upto
Meaning – The Usefulness of Narrative
Inquiry in Public Adminstration Research’,
Public Administration Review 65(2) : 143-
157
Rawlinson, M. and Clark, P. (?) ‘Corporate
History, Narrative and Business
Knowledge’, Final Report to ESRC (Grant
RES-334-25-0013) 26