Introduction
This chapter is about why and how historical methods are suitable for studies of strategy as practice (SAP) with its focus on activities that characterize strategy and strategizing (Reference Vaara and WhittingtonVaara and Whittington 2012). Despite an increasing interest in using history in SAP research, for example in explaining the development of a firm, the emergence of its competitive advantages, and its use of history as a resource in the strategy process (Reference Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones and SilvermanArgyres et al. 2020), as well as recent developments in cognate fields such as business and organizational history, there is still a need for research that makes history a key part of our understanding of strategy processes and practices (Reference Vaara and LambergVaara and Lamberg 2016). By introducing and elaborating different categories of historical methods, the chapter offers insights into how to use such methods. The ambition is to bring clarity to how we can approach SAP research from a historical perspective.
SAP research provides important insights into practice, praxis and the roles and identities of practitioners, using a variety of methods (Reference Jarzabkowski and SpeeJarzabkowski and Spee 2009; Reference Vaara and WhittingtonVaara and Whittington 2012), yet with little regard to history. Still, SAP studies are inherently temporal. They refer to temporal phenomena such as routines (Reference Campbell-HuntCampbell-Hunt 2007; Reference Seidl, Grossman-Hensel, Jarzabkowski, Feldman, Pentland, D’Adderio, Dittrich, Rerup and SeidlSeidl, Grossman-Hensel and Jarzabkowski 2021), path dependency (Reference JarzabkowskiJarzabkowski 2004), institutionalization (Reference Thakhathi, le Roux and DavisThakhathi, le Roux and Davis 2019), strategic change (Reference Wei and ZhangWei and Zhang 2020), the emergence of strategy, structure and processes (Reference Kwayu, Lal and AbubakreKwayu, Lal and Abubakre 2018), the exercise of virtue through habituation (Reference TsoukasTsoukas 2018), and the reinvigoration of practice (Reference Jarzabkowski, Kavas and KrullJarzabkowski, Kavas and Krull 2021). Although some studies do incorporate the notion of history (Gomez, Chapter 8 in this volume; Reference Gomez and BoutyGomez and Bouty 2011), and others implicitly account for history (e.g., Reference Balogun and JohnsonBalogun and Johnson 2004; Reference Clarke, Kwon and WodakClarke, Kwon and Wodak 2012; Reference DoughertyDougherty 2004; Reference GiraudeauGiraudeau 2008; Reference Hendry, Kiel and NicholsonHendry, Kiel and Nicholson 2010; Reference Jørgensen and MessnerJørgensen and Messner 2010; Reference Kaplan and OrlikowskiKaplan and Orlikowski 2013; Reference RouleauRouleau 2005; Reference Stensaker and FalkenbergStensaker and Falkenberg 2007; Reference Whittington, Cailluet and Yakis-DouglasWhittington, Cailluet and Yakis-Douglas 2011), the interest in historical method is limited. On the basis of a review of the emergence of distinct streams of SAP research, Reference Kohtamäki, Whittington, Vaara and RabetinoKohtamäki et al. (2021) acknowledge that methodological approaches build on interviews, internal documents, ethnographic observations and video ethnography, but do not bring history to the fore. The multi-dimensional approach suggested by Reference da Silveira Santos, Tureta and Felixda Silveira Santos, Tureta and Felix (2021) to guide empirical studies of SAP through linking together Reference HeideggerHeidegger’s (1962) interpretative phenomenology, narrative, ethnography and grounded theory tends to leave history out of account, even as studies are oriented towards process. Thus, in a recent review of the first two decades of SAP research and its potential future directions (Reference Jarzabkowski, Seidl and BalogunJarzabkowski, Seidl and Balogun 2022), it is not surprising that the role of history, historical perspectives and methods are missing completely.
The above-mentioned studies are all examples of promising work but we need to push the development of practice-based, history-oriented research further, elevating the dimension of history through the application of suitable methods. Inspired by Reference Wadhwani, Decker, Mir and JainWadhwani and Decker (2017), Reference Lubinski, Gartner and CalabròLubinski and Gartner (2020) propose a historical claim-making process through which business history research can be engaged. History is described as source and method that contribute to the development of new theory, questions taken-for-granted assumptions, and traces historical actors’ interpretations and changes over time. Further, the study of strategy has its own history, one in which the work of historians and the use of historical methods have been a central influence, most notably through the work of Alfred D. Chandler. However, historians have not shown themselves strongly aware of the practice stream.
This chapter is organized as follows. First, we direct our attention to business and other historians and their relationship with strategy scholarship. This section includes an examination of the sources used in business history research, the ways in which they are employed and the theoretical frameworks within which they are deployed. Next, we map how we might begin to reconcile history and SAP through method. We present and elaborate four different categories of historical methods suitable for the study of SAP. These categories refer to written sources and narratives, microhistory, ego documents and lived experience. The concluding section of the chapter reflects on these categories, their challenges and limits. It also comments on the meaning and implications of a historical approach within a SAP perspective.
The Use of Historical Methods in Traditional Strategy Research
All strategies, being enacted amid the flow of time, not only have a history but unfold history through a practice associated with a past (Reference Ericson, Melin, Golsorkhi, Rouleau, Seidl and VaaraEricson and Melin 2010). This formulation recruits both temporality and history, which terms are not synonymous. Historians tell stories about strategies in very particular ways, however. Some time ago, Reference LipartitoLipartito (1995: 5–6) contended that business historians had barely begun to notice a ‘simple temporal fact’, namely that, in ‘undertaking action, especially creative, innovative actions, organizations must project themselves into the future, beyond what is readily known’. In this vision, even rationality becomes a temporally relative term, a ‘function of when a decision is taken’ (Reference LipartitoLipartito 1995: 17). This matters, as mainstream strategy studies owe a considerable debt to business historians, who constitute probably the largest community of scholars to have considered strategy from explicitly historical perspectives.
As it emerged, the discipline of business history was closely related to the use of case, suggesting a way to design a study. A case study, employing a qualitative method, can be presented as a narrative with the potential to enable a richer understanding of practice. In business history, despite frequently using narrative approaches, strategy is often framed as something made through isolated moments of intentional decision-making that provide critical turning points in a chronological narrative flow of events. The narrative leads up to the moment of a strategic decision, ushering in the future, shaped by the strategic decision taken. Moreover, in this approach, strategy is done by identifiable, often elite agents, who are operating within the context of organizational structure and environmental constraints. As Reference McKenna, Clarke, Lamoreaux and UsselmanMcKenna (2009: 231) notes, case writers must remain confident in their ability to impute ‘strategic intentionality from historical outcomes’.
The relationship between business history and case study as a ‘method’ was cemented by the dominant influence over both business history and strategy studies once exerted by Chandler (Reference McKennaMcKenna 2006). Chandler’s influence over the study of strategy was continued in the work of Reference RumeltRumelt (1974) and, more recently, Reference Whittington and MayerWhittington and Mayer (2000), who maintain that many of the world’s largest corporations, founded in the nineteenth century, can serve as a reference point for research on strategy and structure. Their work has led to the gradual refinement of the so-called strategy–structure–ownership–performance (SSOP) nexus. Papers on strategy and structure continue to appear in core business history journals. However, over the last decade the study of strategy has become less central to the thematic preoccupations of business history.
Thus, the writing of business history on strategy has had very specific characteristics that need to be carefully identified. Central has been the strategy–structure nexus. Reference ChandlerChandler (1962) argued that strategy leads structure in a dynamic, unidirectional pattern of change. Temporality is not problematized in this view of strategy: time is irreversible, and chains of cause and effect proceed in a path-dependent fashion. Reference McKinlayMcGovern and McLean (2013: 453) claim that at a certain point in the history of the studied firm, a ‘“path of competence development” had been set’. At the same time, the focus on strategy as the outcome of decision promotes a particular view of managerial agency. As Reference McKinlayMcKinlay (2013: 141) argues, business history is subject to a ‘centripetal pull … towards managerial decision-making as the decisive agent’.
Chandler’s influence over subsequent business historical studies of strategy has been called a ‘compelling foundational narrative’ (Reference ScrantonScranton 2008: 427). Relatively few business historians have looked to other later streams in strategy studies for theoretical lenses. Reference Kipping and CailluetKipping and Cailluet’s (2010) deployment of Reference MintzbergMintzberg’s (1989) emergent perspective on a historical case is almost unique. Reference Kipping and CailluetKipping and Cailluet (2010: 103) frame their study by using the strategy and structure duality and conclude that ‘the company always found a way to direct its own course’.
As argued above, the dominant approach to studying strategy from a historical perspective can and should be subject to critique. Reference Adorisio and MutchAdorisio and Mutch (2013: 106) regard business history as ‘rather a conservative discipline’, while also lamenting the ‘presentism’ of much management and organization studies. Reference Bell and TaylorBell and Taylor (2013: 133) contend that the business history ‘community remains characterized by methodological detachment and epistemological disengagement’. Apart from work relating to the concept of routine (Reference JonesJones 2002; Reference Raff and ScrantonRaff and Scranton 2016), the closest business history has come to a practice-based perspective is likely in the work of Reference LipartitoLipartito (2013).
Noting the discipline’s reliance on functional models derived from economics, Reference LipartitoLipartito (1995) makes a plea for taking the role of culture much more seriously. He explicitly relates culture to practice, viewing culture as ‘a system of values, ideas, and beliefs which constitute a mental apparatus for grasping reality’ (Reference LipartitoLipartito 1995: 2).
There are several reasons why business historians have neglected practice when studying strategy. However, as we shall see, there are indications this is changing. The first reason is epistemological, referring to the high wall that historians, according to Reference Bell and TaylorBell and Taylor (2013), build around their own practices. Another is a bias, inherited from Reference ChandlerChandler (1962), that is relatively unconcerned with the ‘day-to-day practices we call “business”’ (Reference 573LipartitoLipartito 2008: 432). A further reason is methodological: specifically, the nature of the sources and their use, particularly the use of corporate archives. In both these last two areas change is also occurring.
Perhaps most indicative of these recent developments is the edited volume Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods (Reference Bucheli and WadhwaniBucheli and Wadhwani 2014), which across an impressive span of chapters written by both historians and organization scholars considers the challenges and opportunities, conceptual and methodological, from tighter, deeper integration between history and organization studies with the purpose of examining ‘why and how historical research and reasoning should be used in the study of management, organizations, and industries’ (Reference Wadhwani, Bucheli, Bucheli and WadhwaniWadhwani and Bucheli 2014: 3). Most relevant here is historian Fear’s chapter, examining strategy processes at the German industrial giant Thyssen through the ‘sedimentation of thousands of … hidden choices within the firm [that] created organizational capacity and shaped future decision making’ (Reference Fear, Bucheli and WadhwaniFear 2014: 170). As Reference Fear, Bucheli and WadhwaniFear (2014: 186) concludes, one of ‘the key powers of historical perspective is the ability to reflect intelligently on the temporal distance between past and present so as to generate new learning’. Historians Reference RaffRaff (2013) and Reference PoppPopp (2013) consider the micro-foundations of such sedimented decisions as choices made in time. Yet more recently, Reference Perchard, MacKenzie, Decker and FaveroPerchard et al. (2017: 905) reviewed advances in historical approaches to strategy, entrepreneurship and international business, noting the ‘repeatedly restated … need for, and the importance of, history in and to the discipline’ of strategy studies. The authors note, as we do, that advances have so far been relatively limited.
Challenges of Traditional Historical Methods
Historical work builds on careful attention to a variety of sources, assessing their authenticity, representativeness and relevance. Textual sources, especially documentary ones are privileged but, increasingly, historians use a wide range of sources, including oral sources, images and other representations such as fiction, artefacts and ephemera (Reference ToshTosh 2010). Business history relies heavily on the business archive, as ‘archival records are a constitutive element of business historical research, and such research, in turn, is fundamental for a holistic understanding of the role of enterprise in modern capitalist societies’ (Reference SchwarzkopfSchwarzkopf 2012: 1). It often limits itself to aspects and entities of history that have an archive, though those archival traces may be scattered across many different sites rather than concentrated in a single archive maintained by the business itself. Moreover, practices simply do not find themselves recorded in corporate archives. Until very recently business historians tended to naturalize the archive, refusing to problematize its contents, organization or use.
Corporate archives are very particular entities in their content and organization, such that the ‘order of the business archive reflects and constitutes modern power’ (Reference McKinlayMcKinlay 2013: 141, emphasis in original). Knowledge of the past is packaged in historical narratives and strategically communicated (Reference Foster, Coraiola, Suddaby, Kroezen and ChandlerFoster et al. 2017). History can result in a monovocal and hegemonic narrative that obscures alternative voices (Reference EricsonEricson 2018) and in an interdiscursivity that forms a network of meanings (Vaara, Chapter 30 in this volume). History can be used purposefully as a resource (Reference BrunningeBrunninge 2009), as a potent political tool (Reference Brown and ThompsonBrown and Thompson 2013), with text produced for different audiences (Langley and Lusiani, Chapter 33 in this volume). A particular retrospective understanding of the firm is written into the archives over time as cumulative decisions are taken as to what to include and preserve, and exclude, and thus often to destroy. Archives often concentrate on ‘official’ documentation, beginning with accounting and ownership data, followed by the minutes of the board of directors and other high-level boards and committees. High-level correspondence, internal and external, between executives and other offices may survive after careful ‘weeding’, along with contracts and some personnel records. Photographs, technical plans, creative designs, press clippings, advertising materials and memoirs are all considered little better than ephemera; their survival should normally be regarded as a matter of chance rather than of design. At the same time, it should be noted that the vast majority of firms never leave behind any meaningful archival trace and are, in a sense, largely unrecoverable.
The cumulative effect of this building of the archives is to silently shape the histories that can be written. Reference SchwarzkopfSchwarzkopf (2012) points out the interesting case of a leading British advertising agency that was effectively wiped from historical memory when all its records were destroyed in the late 1960s after its merger with an American firm. Now the history of advertising is dominated by the history of the ‘winners’. Even when they exist, though, the records contain many silences. When attempting to write the history of the strategy and growth of one particular firm, Reference McKinlayMcGovern and McLean (2013: 456) discovered that ‘no clearly articulated strategy was described in board meeting minutes’. From a SAP perspective this might be considered a somewhat naïve expectation. Even if researchers maintain a belief that strategy is a result of the conscious decisions of executives, however, such records as minute books can be deeply disappointing.
If the content of the archive itself constrains strategy studies from a historical perspective, so do the attitudes of some historians. The archive is a site of power; the silences are not just mere accidents resulting from the haphazard erosion of the past. Silences reflect the choices of those who have the power to make them. We have to be profoundly careful about conceptualizing archives as the ‘memory of an organization’ (Reference DeckerDecker 2013: 160). Business history has not always acknowledged this process of silencing, and has tended to naturalize the archive as a relatively complete and objective representation of the ‘reality’ of the firm’s history. However, debate about the status of the archive is becoming much more frequent (Reference DeckerDecker 2013; Reference PoppFellman and Popp 2013; Reference Kobrak and SchneiderKobrak and Schneider 2011; Reference SchwarzkopfSchwarzkopf 2012).
Furthermore, a wider range of sources and traces than is typically discovered in the corporate archive is finding its way into the practices of some business historians (e.g., Reference French and PoppFrench and Popp 2010). Nonetheless, if the archive long remained a largely unrecognized complex of problems, especially in a SAP perspective, change can be seen. Reference DeckerDecker (2014), for example, adopts an innovative ethnographic approach to conceptualizing the archive, while Reference Popp and FellmanPopp and Fellman (2020) explicitly address the configurations of power (and silence) that converge around archives, shaping the histories that can be written from them.
In summation, the challenges involved in a closer integration of a historical perspective into SAP research are considerable. Despite their interest in the inherently processual nature of practice, practice scholars are not always attuned to thinking historically and, contrary to business historians, they may even lack sensitivity to context as emphasized by Reference MacKay, Chia and NairMacKay, Chia and Nair (2021) in their critique of some oversights in the SAP field. Business historians are often interested in looking for fine-grained practices but from a different perspective, less often theorizing such everyday practices as micro-foundations of strategy formation and enactment. In any case, these fine-grained practices are seldom captured in the sources on which business historians typically rely, or must be inferred indirectly from such sources as Reference Fear, Bucheli and WadhwaniFear (2014) attempts. Therefore, if the corporate archive is silent on much of what goes on inside a firm, it is perhaps most silent on that which interests the SAP researcher. Examples are the vast majority of formal meetings below the highest echelons; all informal meetings on every echelon, such as gatherings in corridors, coffee breaks, evenings in the pub; and even what most employees, managers and operatives, alike, actually do from day to day: when they turn up, when they leave, the tasks they perform in between and how they go about performing them, even if exactly such events are the focus of recent moves to bring together business history and histories of the everyday (Reference PoppPopp 2020). Nor does the archive directly record how people feel about, interpret and react to the experience of work and organizational life, nor the tacit, unwritten codes that shape organizational life and lie submerged under the organizational charts that represent the firm. Here, however, it is also worth noting recent moves to integrate business history and the history of emotions in an attempt at revealing the affective dimensions of historical organizational life (Reference Cooper and PoppCooper and Popp 2023).
It is also worth noting that there is an increasing interest in providing more fine-grained explanations of past events and strategic actions, investigating temporal orientations of decision-makers and employment of past knowledge and resources to create competitive advantage (Reference Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones and SilvermanArgyres et al. 2020), and in advancing our understanding of strategic practice through taking historical embeddedness seriously (Reference Vaara and LambergVaara and Lamberg 2016). Reference Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones and SilvermanArgyres et al. (2020: 345) emphasize the dual nature of history in their definition of history-informed strategy research as ‘strategy research that draws on historical research methods and/or leverages history as a key component (or variable) of theory or empirical analysis’. They consider it important to collect datasets amenable to statistical analysis and building and testing theoretical interpretations of strategy processes and outcomes. Going further, Reference Vaara and LambergVaara and Lamberg (2016: 651) discuss three history approaches in account of ontoepistemological (ontological and epistemological) and methodological differences, maintaining ‘that it is important not to view history as a mere temporal variable or historical analysis as the sheer use of archival data’. The approaches are realist history, interpretive history and poststructuralist history.
The aim of the realist history approach, ontoepistemologically reflecting scientific realism, is to provide an accurate reconstruction of past events and their casual relationships and engage in contextualized comparisons to distinguish general patterns and idiosyncratic features, using methods such as case study and comparative historical analysis. The interpretive history approach, in ontoepistemological terms described as social constructionist and hermeneutic, implies empathetic understanding of events and practices. A particularly fruitful method is microhistory, illuminating different layers of a historical context, patterns and characteristics of strategy processes and practices across contexts, roles and identities of strategic actors and how strategic practices are enacted, as Reference Vaara and LambergVaara and Lamberg (2016) point out. Ontoepistemologically, the poststructuralist history approach suggests radical constructionism as expressed through the problematization of historical truths. By employing genealogy as a method, associated with Reference FoucaultFoucault’s (1977) discursive analysis, the prevailing discourses of specific time periods are examined, and their implications for subjectivity and power elaborated (cf. Allard-Poesi, Chapter 10 in this volume).
Methods for Studying SAP Historically: Four Categories
From the preceding reviews it can be seen that we face ontoepistemological, conceptual and methodological challenges. Our purpose here is not to solve these different challenges but to put the emphasis on the scope and use of historical methods. It seems evident that business historians and strategy practice scholars overlap in their interest in strategizing processes in the flow of time and that a dialogue is thus worthwhile. Encouragingly, some business historians are beginning to engage explicitly with, for example, process theory (Reference Popp and HoltPopp and Holt 2012) and narrativization (Reference HansenHansen 2012).
Nonetheless, we largely lack methods designed specifically for studies of history in connection to strategy practice. This section attempts to narrow the implied gap by attending to four categories of historical methods. It draws extensively on our own work as this enables us to provide insights into the genesis and operation of the methods. The first category relates to written sources and narratives, re-examining relatively ‘conventional’ sources with a different eye on and an attention to the omissions and silences, interpretively focused on the deconstruction of what it is the source might be expected to tell us. The second category concerns microhistory and is derived from the increasingly influential microhistorical approach, which has been described as a ‘method of clues’. The third category dedicates attention to so-called ego documents, including letters, diaries, memoirs, wills and similar documents expressive of personal experiences, desires and values. The first three categories all revolve around both a particular type of sources and approaches to reading and interpreting them. The emphasis on sources as the foundation of our suggested methodological approaches to studying SAP historically reflects history’s instinct for the inductive work and the paucity of the traces of practice in conventional business history sources. Finally, the fourth category refers to lived experience, which is perhaps the most challenging of the categories suggested here. Relatively few historians – including business historians – have been strongly interested in historical tradition and experience as lived. They have often conceived of history as if it were ontologically independent of a subject (though see Reference LipartitoLipartito 2020 for a recent and highly sophisticated consideration of the ontologies of business history). Lived experience, addressing the ontological level, implies an existential mode of being in the world that entails the dialogical way individuals relate to each other and to the cultural past (Reference GadamerGadamer 1989). It emphasizes interpretation and understanding mediated through language – the universal medium through which we live our lives.
Re-reading Conventional Sources and Narratives
The first category of historical methods is based on the re-reading of accepted accounts or reading conventional sources differently. Exemplary here is Reference McKenna, Clarke, Lamoreaux and UsselmanMcKenna’s (2009) deconstruction of a Harvard teaching case focused on the Honda motorcycle company. History writing quite often adopts a narrative pattern. Narratives have a powerful naturalizing force. In particular, narratives and narrativizing appear to allow time its true role, as understood in common-sense terms: life lived forwards. Perhaps as a result, unsurprisingly, narratives dominate the framing of many studies of strategizing through the vast majority of business history and beyond.
By incorporating narrative and storytelling aspects of discourse, SAP studies provide descriptions of situated actions and interactions, sociality and meaning (Cunliffe, Chapter 26 in this volume), intrinsically linking what, how and who questions of strategy practice (Reference Balogun, Beech, Johnson, Golsorkhi, Rouleau, Seidl and VaaraBalogun, Beech and Johnson 2015). Narrative helps the researcher dealing with polyphony and a complex interrelatedness of social processes (Reference Brown and ThompsonBrown and Thompson 2013), creating a future through a dispersed and fragmented collective narrative (de La Ville and Mounoud, Chapter 11 in this volume). On the basis of a biographical method, narrative is defined as a sequential account of events, positioning the practitioners in a socio-historical context (Rouleau, Chapter 28 in this volume).
Archival sources are used in constructing corporate history, analytically structured history, serial history and ethnographic history. As Reference DeckerRowlinson, Hassard and Decker (2014) acknowledge, corporate history consists of a holistic and objectivist narrative usually regarding one entity. Analytically structured history is based on a selective use of archival sources driven by specific concepts such as strategy and structure (cf. Reference ChandlerChandler 1962). Serial history provides a predefined set of chronologically continuous sources, and ethnographic history views archival sources as text for an interpretation of culture. Ethnographers and SAP scholars are both concerned with how people carry out their strategies in everyday social practice. Cunliffe (Chapter 26 in this volume) focuses on ethnography as a methodology that through a theorizing from extensive and multiple sources of data about micro-practices in a natural setting allows insight into the observable but also the tacit knowledge held by the strategists.
In terms of the effect of these processes on our scholarship, it can subtly lead us to see strategy as a deliberative motive force and, moreover, one initiated and directed by identifiable, often elite agents, within the context of organizational structure and environmental constraints. We need to be cautious, however, as these naturalizing effects occlude and close down just as much as they expose. In fact, Reference McKenna, Clarke, Lamoreaux and UsselmanMcKenna (2009: 221) demonstrates in the textual and intellectual unpacking of the chosen Harvard case how ‘the successive accumulation of artefacts has made each subsequent round of analysis ever more dependent on previous interpretations’. No matter how distant the text became from the world it sought to describe and explain, the case writers remained confident of their ability to impute ‘strategic intentionality from the historical outcomes’ (Reference McKenna, Clarke, Lamoreaux and UsselmanMcKenna 2009: 231).
Reference McKenna, Clarke, Lamoreaux and UsselmanMcKenna (2009) did something easy to describe but difficult to do well. He reversed and ran backwards the stages by which a series of narratives accumulated around the famous strategy case. In doing so, he exposed to the light the mechanics of how this totemic object lesson in strategizing became ‘particularly over-determined’ and ‘how the original problem came to be buried under a series of didactic mementos created by each succeeding generation’ (Reference McKenna, Clarke, Lamoreaux and UsselmanMcKenna 2009: 220). As those mementos accumulate, the certainty increases that only one explanation is right. Reference Popp and HoltPopp and Holt (2013) performed a similar exercise and presented a ‘double reading’ of an historical entrepreneurial case, revealing the ability of narrative formation to shape interpretation and understanding.
In contrast, the study by one of us, Reference PoppPopp (2001), emerged from work with some very conventional business history sources, utilizing a series of auditors’ reports to explore family and firm culture and its impact on strategy formation at prestige pottery manufacturer Minton and Sons. These reports ran in sequence for a number of years, from a period in the late nineteenth century during which the firm was facing severe pressures. This made them valuable. Moreover, they were in some cases quite extensive, being almost closer to a consultant’s report than a typical auditor’s report and including recommendations that represented potentially very significant shifts in the firm’s strategy. Thus, they contained a great deal of very useful factual information, as well as discussion of the firm’s existing strategies. They would undoubtedly have helped fleshing out a conventional narrative of how the firm survived that period in its history. They had more to give, however. First, it was not clear why they even existed. The firm was not a publicly listed company at the time and was under no legal obligation to employ an external auditor. This insight depended on the historian’s typical contextual knowledge, in this case of British company law. Two questions arose then: why had the reports been commissioned, and how were they received?
This is a very clear example of a method whereby a historian will arrive at his/her research question from the source. The reports themselves were unable to answer either question, however. Elsewhere in the archive, though, there was found a brief and apparently inconsequential internal memorandum. In fact, this scrap, the only traceable reaction by senior managers to the auditors, provided a critical statement of the firm’s strategic thinking at this vital juncture. The memo utterly rejected the auditors’ recommendations and did so not on the basis of a forensic analysis but through appeal to the firm’s history, prestige and values. Suddenly we gain a new understanding of strategy formation in a profoundly inchoate manner from deep, almost subterranean wells of culture. Methodologically, the insight derives from bringing into dialogue the two sources; practically, it emerges from an alert reading of the sources that notices that the dialogue is possible.
Microhistory
In the above example, the singular memorandum existed as part of a very large and quite typical corporate archive and it acted as the key that unlocked the solution to a problem. Our second category, microhistory, starts from a focus on micro-scale moments and events, suggesting an obvious affinity with the interest of SAP in the quotidian. In contrast to the example of the memorandum given above, its clues are not only small but also often isolated and unusual. Moreover, they act not as end points but beginnings, spurring the research question that is to be pursued. Microhistory emphasizes dual timeframes, accounting for both context of individual and collective actions and consequences of actions (Reference Hargadon and WadhwaniHargadon and Wadhwani 2022). It also emphasizes the duality of sources as exceptional/normal. Simply to work with very small, odd, anomalous or fragmented pieces of evidence is not enough, however.
Microhistory focuses on the so-called double movement between the micro and macro levels (Reference MedickMedick 2016; Reference TrivellatoTrivellato 2015). This proposes a methodological move of zooming in and out, changing the scale of study from the local to the global level, and back (Reference de Vriesde Vries 2019). Scale has become the standard analytical tool used to overcome the micro-macro and local-global divides (Reference de Vitode Vito 2019). There is also a focus on mobility, captured in moving stories that refer to conversion and exile, for example (Reference GhobrialGhobrial 2019). Mobility suggests variation in historical contexts, requiring the researcher to deal with and understand different languages, archival traditions and systems of record-keeping.
Thus, there is a deliberate, repeated and ongoing shifting in focus between the particular and the general, echoing the importance of differing contexts as emphasized in the SAP perspective (Reference Johnson, Langley, Melin and WhittingtonJohnson et al. 2007; Reference Vaara and WhittingtonVaara and Whittington 2012). The ‘movement from one level or sphere is qualitative, and generates new information’ (Reference PeltonenPeltonen 2001: 357). This movement throws light in unexpected ways, through surprise dichotomies and affinities. Illustrative here is Reference PoppHolt and Popp’s (2013) study of succession strategy at the family firm Wedgwood and Sons in the late eighteenth century. The study revolves around a single letter written by founder Josiah Wedgwood to his son Jos (Josiah II), acknowledging the latter’s desire to leave the business. It is a remarkable document: deeply felt, displaying great sensitivity and very difficult to make sense of in the context of Josiah’s life as a highly driven and successful entrepreneur who had expressed an explicit desire that his sons inherit his business.
Making sense of this documentary source requires a deep and careful reading of the letter itself and, simultaneously, lifting our eyes from it to explore not only Josiah’s wider correspondence but also the broader social, political and religious milieu. Read thus, the letter opened a wide window on the normally submerged topic of emotions in family business and their relationship to strategy formation emerging out of the depths of interpersonal relations. What first appears to be a very deliberate, conscious process of strategic decision-making is revealed through the microhistorian’s double movement as the working out of long-run and often hidden or implicit modes of being and practices within a specific organizational-familial setting. At the end of their study the authors conclude: ‘The moment of succession was not a singular event; it sprang from a welter of symbolic, material and institutional arrangements gathered by Josiah and his family, and it projected all manner of possibility as purposes and relations were (re)worked amongst members’ (Reference PoppHolt and Popp 2013: 14).
Microhistory can struggle to build a stable edifice on mundane sources, however. The wider connections built up cannot be mere allusions or similes; they need to be rooted in deep contextual knowledge. If this work is done, microhistory is possible from the most mundane of sources, such as even a single anonymously sent postcard, as its starting point for interpretation (Reference PoppPopp 2014). Organizational life, routines, processes and practices generate billions of documents and other artefacts. The vast majority of these are truly banal; a few, though, possess great potential. The keys to good microhistory as a method include, on the one hand, care, precision and exactitude and, on the other, imagination, intuition and creativity.
Ego Documents
Mention of letters also gestures towards the third category of historical methods, namely ego documents. Reference Fulbrook and RublackFulbrook and Rublack (2010: 263) define an ego document as one ‘providing an account of, or privileged information about, the “self” who produced it’. This account can also be referred to as a self-narrative or a testimony to the self. Ego documents relating to the role of emotions in human life ‘provide the opportunity to delve deep into the human psyche, to throw light on specific aspects of human existence, as it is told by those who took part in the event’, adds Reference MagnússonMagnússon (2017: 313). Letters are exemplary ego documents. Apart from letters, ego documents could include diaries, memoirs, wills and other documents expressive of personal desires, priorities and values.
Reference PoppPopp (2012) and Reference Popp and HoltPopp and Holt (2012; Reference Popp2013) draw on a large collection of ego documents. More than 200 personal letters exchanged between members of one business family over a period of more than four decades. At the core of the collection are more than 100 letters between a married couple engaged in an entrepreneurial enterprise. Utilizing these letters to understand the couple’s motivations, values and experiences as entrepreneurs demanded immersion in the codes of romantic correspondence prevalent in their society at the time. Given the mass of both primary and secondary material necessary to reach this understanding, this was a slow process for which there was no short cut. Instead, the researchers had to (literally) live with the material.
Much of what we might think of as strategy practice might be located in and experienced by the self. As Reference Fulbrook and RublackFulbrook and Rublack (2010) warn, however, ego documents can be very problematic sources with which to work. Their potential drawback lies in what is also their very strength: the apparent immediacy and authenticity of the access they give to the self. As social selves, though, we very rarely, if ever, write purely from the essential, internal self. Rather, even when we are writing with no audience in mind at all as in a private diary, we write in ways mediated through codes, usages and shared languages. We draw on repertoires of expression adopted from elsewhere, relapsing often into cliché and convention. Understanding these shared linguistic threads and conventions is, in methodological terms, the key to opening up the ego document to interpretation. Moreover, ‘due to the proliferation of digital data in the habitus of everyday life as a result of the widespread use of multimedia electronic recording devices’, our understanding of ego documents is shifting (Reference Mascuch, Dekker and BaggermanMascuch, Dekker and Baggerman 2016: 47). Ego documents become virtual files, a change that poses challenges for traditional analogue-based historical interpretation and analysis (though see e.g., Reference Nix and DeckerNix and Decker 2021). However, very recently Reference Tinning and LubinskiTinning and Lubinski (2022) have published a highly valuable study of the uses of ego documents in management and organizational history. This should become an essential point of methodological guidance.
Lived Experience
Ego documents might also provide glimpses of what is commonly termed ‘lived experience’, the fourth and final method category for incorporating a historical perspective on SAP studies we present here. Lived experience, a phenomenological concept first offered by Reference DiltheyDilthey (1985), refers to the pre-reflective dimensions of human existence. In accordance with the dwelling mode, grounded in Reference HeideggerHeidegger’s (1962) hermeneutic-phenomenological thinking, lived experience associates with an interpretation and understanding that propose a movement in the sense of feeling one’s way through a world that is itself in motion (Reference ChiaChia 2004; Reference Chia and HoltChia and Holt 2006; Chia and Rasche, Chapter 1 in this volume). Applying a Heideggerian perspective on SAP, Tsoukas (Chapter 2 in this volume) adds that non-deliberate spontaneous acting is practical coping embedded within a broader socio-material context, the teleological-affective inherited background formed out of habits and customs.
Influenced by the work of Heidegger, Reference GadamerGadamer (1989), from a philosophical-hermeneutical perspective, further elaborates the notion of lived experience in association with ‘hermeneutical situatedness’. This means that the lived experience category accentuates a dialogical openness to experience as dependent on historical grounding. Accordingly, this method category is not made up of techniques that assist us in describing lived experience of history. Lived experience does not imply an enduring residue of specific moments in a human being’s life. Lived experience refers to an ongoing integrative life process with which the practitioner entwines, hermeneutically situated – as represented by ‘horizon’. Horizon refers to an individual’s standpoint and current understanding of a matter, and is always in motion (Reference GadamerGadamer 1989).
Lived experience implicates a qualitative method that can be realized through techniques such as protocol-writing, interviewing and observation. Protocol-writing is the generation of original descriptive text of a person’s experience. Such a text avoids causal explanations and generalizations, presenting practice as lived through – ‘from the inside, as it were; almost like a state of mind’ (Reference van Manenvan Manen 1990: 64). From a lived experience perspective we are then not interested in the practitioner’s subjective experiences. Instead, we try to understand what it is the practitioner does as an aspect of the practitioner’s life, remaining oriented to the question of what it is like and what it means to be involved in strategy practice. As researchers we need to remember that lived experience questions are meaning questions and that lived experience ‘can never be grasped in its full richness and depth since lived experience implicates the totality of life’ (Reference van Manenvan Manen 1990: 36).
Interviewing, in the form of dialogue and conversation, could also help us to stay close to experience as lived, serving as a means for exploring experiential narrative material. Echoing Reference HeideggerHeidegger’s (1962) hermeneutic-phenomenological work, Reference RicoeurRicoeur (1992) offers an understanding of narrative as the essence of our being in the world in its lived experience becomingness. Human experience of time is deepened by narration; narrative mediates between permanence in time and change in time. The strategists entwine with, connect to and disconnect from present future-oriented and present past-oriented activities (Reference EricsonEricson 2018).
Through the words the practitioners use when telling about their here-and-now involvement, practice opens up to a historical dimension. It comes alive in practitioners’ present efforts to keep in force a cultural past intrinsically linked to practice (Reference EricsonEricson 2014). As pointed out by Reference Ericson, Melin, Golsorkhi, Rouleau, Seidl and VaaraEricson and Melin (2010), the dialogical, conversational form of interviewing promotes a historical-grounded understanding of SAP, represented by horizon. They illustrate that it is through the broadening of horizon the practitioner changes the understanding while looking beyond the present standpoint and reconstructing the past. Moreover, the practitioner’s own past and that of a specific geographical place spur a move in terms of a broadening of the practitioner’s horizon. Practitioners involved in implementing a renewed business concept admittedly broaden their horizons. They re-present and reconstruct a past when letting go of old familiar ways of doing strategy. When practitioners close in on old ways of doing strategy, a constraining horizon movement is acknowledged.
Since the ‘best way to enter a person’s lived experience is to participate in it’, close observation is a suitable technique for generating lived experience material (Reference van Manenvan Manen 1990: 69). As observer and participant the researcher can get nearer to a particular situation but must be prepared to step back and reflect on the meaning of the situation at hand.
Protocol-writing, interviewing and observation can help us to transform glimpses of lived experience into an oral or written expression. Yet we need to realize that such expressions are never identical with lived experience because ‘lived experience is always more complex than the result of any singular description’, and ‘there is always an element of the ineffable to life’ (Reference van Manenvan Manen 1990: 16).
Finally, before concluding, we comment on recent developments in the relationship between history and SAP.
Recent Developments
In a 2018 special issue of Strategic Management Journal, focused on ‘Strategy processes and practices: dialogues and intersections’, Reference Burgelman, Floyd, Lamanen, Mantere, Vaara and WhittingtonBurgelman et al. (2018) propose a combinatory approach for understanding strategy processes and practices, reconciling process and practice through the inclusion of history. The ontology of the combinatory approach emphasizes that the organization is a product of activity and that processes, practices and actors are constituted of ongoing activity. This approach is grounded in the acknowledgement that history is valid for both process and practice streams of research.
These drives speak to history’s concern for contextualization. Critically, for historians, the object of study and its context are always treated as interpenetrating. We can see this most clearly in microhistory where the greatest difference is set up between object of study and context. In fact, this aims at erasing ‘artificial levels of analysis’ such that ‘strategic change processes are seen to include all the ongoing activities that not only reform organizations, but also reproduce them over time’ (Reference Burgelman, Floyd, Lamanen, Mantere, Vaara and WhittingtonBurgelman et al. 2018: 540). In the same issue, Reference Kouamé and LangleyKouamé and Langley (2018) address the link between microprocesses and macro-outcomes. Here microhistory’s famous double movement (cf. Reference de Vitode Vito 2019), a series of constant shifts in scales and units of analysis, timeframes, ways of doing (process) and ways of being (practice), forces attention on not only microprocesses and macro-outcomes but also – simultaneously, and co-constitutively – micro-outcomes and macroprocesses.
None of this erases methodological challenges. Reference Kouamé and LangleyKouamé and Langley (2018) speak of a series of bridging strategies, whilst Reference Mirabeau, Maguire and HardyMirabeau, Maguire and Hardy (2018) focus on transient and ephemeral strategy processes and practices and the methodological difficulties their study brings. Historians are highly practiced in dealing with transience via bridging techniques that by following connections can trace the ghostly presence of once present (now absent) conditions in ongoing phenomena.
As a recent development to reconcile strategy process and SAP promises progress in strategy studies, breaking down barriers between processes and practices, actions and habits, content and change, macro and micro, and between temporalities of varying duration. We believe history can contribute to this promising way forward.
In 2020, Strategic Management Journal published a further special issue, ‘History-informed strategy research: the promise of history and historical research methods in advancing strategy scholarship’. It represents an impressive flowering of the growing intersection of history and strategy studies, taking such implications beyond the consideration of possibilities to nuanced and sophisticated empirical applications. We agree with the special issue editors that bringing history in to dialogue with strategy studies could and should amount to more than simply adding a new source of data, and should extend a more thorough-going reframing (Reference Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones and SilvermanArgyres et al. 2020: 347).) They identify two dimensions of the nexus between history and strategy, namely ‘history to theory’ and ‘history in theory’, emphasizing the use of historical methods and sources for theory building and validation, particularly with regard to the importance of context. With respect to our concerns in this chapter, we might position these dimensions as, respectively, history as method of studying strategy practices and processes in temporal and other contexts, and experienced history as constituent element of emergent strategy practices and processes.
Concluding Discussion
As shown in this chapter, history could play a more prominent role in SAP studies, though there are also reasons to be encouraged by recent developments. In this concluding section we summarize and comment on the categories of historical methods presented, and on the meaning and implications of a historical approach within a SAP perspective. Historical methods are described as ways of approaching history and not as a ‘class of techniques used for the compilation, description, and critical analysis of primary and secondary historical sources’ (Reference Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones and SilvermanArgyres et al. 2020: 345), nor as tools for the development of more informed causal strategy theories (Reference DeckerRowlinson, Hassard and Decker 2014). Written sources and narratives, microhistory, ego documents and lived experience are presented as categories that enable interpretation and understanding of strategy practice in shifting socio-historical contexts and of the strategists’ interactions with others. Mainly interpretive in character, these categories move beyond a realist conceptualization of reality as being ‘out there’, separated from the strategists. There are no predefined, homogeneous and unquestionable entities (cf. Reference de Vitode Vito 2019) to analyse, and there is no historical path to discover. Our suggested method categories are ‘open-ended’, allowing history to emerge, where written sources and narratives construct history, microhistory makes sense of letters and provides room for imagination, intuition and creativity, ego documents throw light on various aspects of human life, and lived experience (in its singularity) emphasizes a dialogical openness to human experience as dependent on historical grounding.
Reflecting on the Method Categories
The method category of conventional sources and narratives implies a re-reading of accepted accounts but also a different reading of business history sources. As pointed out in reference to the Harvard Honda case (Reference McKenna, Clarke, Lamoreaux and UsselmanMcKenna 2009) and the Minton and Sons case (Reference PoppPopp 2001), this category helps us to pay attention to a variety of secondary sources, as well as extrapolating them to see how they apply to primary sources. Based on archival sources in the form of a set of auditors’ reports, Reference PoppPopp (2001) generated rich material for supplying a narrative of how a family firm survived a period in its history. It is interesting to note, though, that these sources instigated new research questions that led to other sources being found elsewhere in the archive.
Narratives have a powerful naturalizing force but we need to critically reflect on their ability to provide trustworthy interpretations of events in the past. Reference McKenna, Clarke, Lamoreaux and UsselmanMcKenna (2009) has shown that a successive narrative accumulation of interpretations of events can be somewhat misleading. If we tend to overdetermine particular occurrences in the past, the result might be an unjustified glorious image of the present and an exaggerated certainty around specific explanations. Written sources and narratives contribute to interpretations of situated actions and interactions, sociality and meaning.
The method category referring to microhistory has great affinity with the interest of SAP. It directs our attention to the movement between micro and macro levels, the local and the global. Deliberately adopted, this category sets out to find a wider, macro resonance at the smallest, micro level. Without taking reality for granted, as researchers we become involved in a repeated and ongoing shifting in focus between the particular and the general (cf. Reference Vaara and LambergVaara and Lamberg 2016). As Reference PoppHolt and Popp’s (2013) study of the leadership succession strategy at a family firm illustrates, a documentary source such as a single letter from the founder of the firm to the son, helps not only with the exploration of personal emotions and interpersonal relations associated with the issue of succession. It gives, in addition, insights into strategy formation in the emerging social, political and religious context.
The microhistory category opens up to an understanding of how the micro and macro levels interact and integrate. Applying this method category in practice-based research thus means that we are able to construct an institutional, macro context through a micro context that apparently could be expressed through a letter. When drawing on such a narrow foundation of source, we must combine care and precision with imagination and creativity.
The application of the method category of ego documents also needs to be addressed with caution. Ego documents include letters, diaries, memoirs, wills and other documents expressing personal desires, priorities and values. As these are very problematic sources they must be read with great care. They cannot be read as direct, unproblematic expressions of desires, priorities and values as they also often reflect codes and languages derived from past contexts. The self is constructed through these documentary sources. The authenticity of the access they provide to historical occurrences and an internal self might be elusive. It is worth adding that working with ego documents is a process that is developing slowly, unfolding almost as though in pace with the life being studied.
The method category associated with lived experience accounts for an ongoing integrative life process with which the practitioner entwines, hermeneutically situated. Akin to the first method category, the lived experience category also provides us with narratives. These narratives originate in an understanding of practitioners’ emergent orientation towards that which they see, experience and construct as reality. As Rouleau (Chapter 28 in this volume) clarifies, narratives of practices allow us to dig into the life-world of strategists. Narratives also assume a joint performance of and intersection between those talking about their direct involvement in practice and the researcher as listener and interpreter (Reference Barry and ElmesBarry and Elmes 1997; Reference BojeBoje 1991). Recognizing our own parts as researchers in the conceptualization of reality, we address SAP as a social phenomenon into which valuable insight can be gained as we engage in dialogues with the practitioners through the use of protocol-writing, interviewing and close observation. At the same time, it is necessary to acknowledge the difficulty in directly accessing practitioner’s lived experience. ‘We have only their life expressions as indicators of their own lived experience’ (Reference SeebohmSeebohm 2004: 94).
In addition, it is important to stress the hybridity of these methods, notwithstanding their presentation here in discrete categories. In practice, there is a considerable blurring of lines once we start working. For example, microhistorical work often relies on ego documents in seeking understanding of lived experience. Nonetheless, as we have illustrated, these categories help us to think about how we approach and use written sources and narratives, microhistory, ego documents and lived experience to bring historical insight into SAP. Our choice of method category will often reflect the starting point from which a research project begins. For example, microhistory could commence with a chance discovery of a document or clue that mystifies us. Re-readings might begin from a sense of dissatisfaction and a subsequent realization that a re-reading of a source concerning an issue or event that we thought we understood is indeed possible.
When Doing Historical Work
For those less familiar with the working practices of those doing history, it is important to stress two important points. First, most historical studies work inductively; they begin with the source and not the theory-related question, unlike the practice in most social sciences (Reference PoppFellman and Popp 2013). It becomes very difficult to design a study in advance and then simply collect the appropriate data. This is a significant methodological difference, and one to which SAP scholars wishing to include a greater historical perspective in their work will need to make some adjustment. The relationship between research question and source becomes a more open, fluid and multidirectional one. It is not merely a difference in method but to some extent also an ontoepistemological one. It leads to a different (not better or worse) class of truth claims. These qualities ensure that historical studies rarely unfold in a linear fashion; there is, rather, a continuous iteration between source, emergent questions and a deepening knowledge of relevant contexts.
Second, doing historical work is a relatively literary endeavour. It is true that, in economic and demographic histories, scholars often work with very large datasets using advanced statistical methods, but the kinds of history relevant to SAP scholars are highly textual. In this process it is neither easy nor meaningful to separate out the different phases of data collection, analysis/interpretation and discussion. Historians may not even think in these terms, and interpretation, in particular, may not be a discrete phase at all but, instead, become acts folded into the process of writing. The method categories we have explored in this chapter tend to share this basic characteristic.
Additionally, it is important to stress that methods allowing for a historical perspective open a window for critical reflection on time, providing us with alternatives for evaluating present occurrences. Practice is an inherently temporal experience. A single action at a point of time is not a practice; it is the passage of time that converts action into practice. With temporality and its relationality in focus, there is also a lived, non-linear time (Reference EricsonEricson 2014). It can be argued, then, that any attention to practice also demands an attention to history and, in particular, to time. An area that remains largely unaddressed in the study of SAP is research elaborating on temporality exposed through the variable ways in which practitioners intimately entwine with practice (Reference Sandberg and Dall’AlbaSandberg and Dall’Alba 2009). If SAP scholars wish to further their interest in time and history, however, then – perhaps counterintuitively – business historians may not be the first people they should look too. Only recently has Reference RaffRaff (2013: 436) urged business historians to ‘do something with time’. Without sufficient attention to time and our experiencing of it, we (historians and SAP scholars) risk stumbling into history’s greatest traps: teleology and determinism – a belief that the present explains the past and a conviction that the present we have is the one we were always, in some way, meant to have; a present that also, in some way, contains the future. They are traps that strip human actors of agency and make them carriers of destiny. A faith in the generative power of deliberate strategy fits well with these beliefs and convictions.
Strategic decision becomes the vehicle for materializing the underlying explanatory logics driving progress forwards to an ordained end. Agents setting and enacting strategies become prescient, far-seeing prophets able to discern the patterns that foreshadow the coming future. This conception of the power of strategizing to reveal the (preordained) future is obviously embedded within a particular, unidirectional vision of time’s flow. Reference LipartitoLipartito’s (1995: 4) critique that ‘we have proceeded on the assumption that business structures [and, de facto, strategies as well] can be thinly described as unproblematic expressions of an underlying, universal process’ may be equally applicable to both mainstream strategy scholarship and much business history.
A Final Comment
History’s strong emphasis on and strengths in contextualization are starting points. They provide a kind of situatedness, if not necessarily a temporalized one. It is hoped that we have pointed the way to some possibilities here. Narratives can be complicated, or even reversed, as Reference McKennaMcKenna (2006; Reference McKenna, Clarke, Lamoreaux and Usselman2009) has shown; and stories can be told before being disrupted and then retold – a method deliberately employed in the historical-processual studies of entrepreneurship by Reference Popp and HoltPopp and Holt (2012; Reference Popp2013). In either case, the past–present–future nexus becomes more complex, folded in on itself in overlapping pleats and layers. Other routes forward might be found through a different approach to the (business) archive – one that looks again at its content with an eye alert to both the dissonant and the submerged. Thus, we might look to sources traditionally eschewed or dismissed, such as a range of ego texts. Here we can marry microhistory’s concern for the exceptional and the normal with the interest in the micro-social within SAP, still connecting to the macro context. Finally, by including the philosophical notion of lived experience, we may increase our awareness of history as a living cultural tradition with which the strategists entwine and continuously move. This means realizing that there is no subject–object relationality that separates the roles of the strategists as investigated objects and the researchers as investigators since we all orient to and mutually adjust to each other through the questions asked and the answers and comments supplied. Ultimately, however, bringing history in to dialogue with strategy studies could and should amount to more than simply adding a new source of data, and should extend to a more thorough-going reframing. It is through such a reframing that we might realize ‘the opportunity to incorporate in a more fine-grained, nuanced and interpretivist way period effects and historical contingencies into the theorizing process’ (Reference Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones and SilvermanArgyres et al. 2020: 347).
