BAM’s Management and Business History Track was restarted in 2011 by Kevin from with help from Dr Roy Edwards, of the University of Southampton, and John Wilson, now Pro-Vice Chancellor for Business and Law at Northumbria University. The track, which encourages scholars to engage with the historical study of management and business topics, has grown over the years and has also seen many successful PDW sessions associated with it. Now, the SIG is being launched with Dr Tennent and Dr Edwards acting as co-chairs, and joined by Alex as secretary and Joe Lane from LSE as treasurer. The SIG aims to continue the work of raising the profile of historical research within BAM and the wider Management Studies field, representing management historians working in UK business and management schools and working with other SIGs to help illustrate the potential of history as a research method. We also seek to encourage the use of history in teaching "mainstream" business and management disciplines and in particular the development of case studies based on archival material. Every field of management studies has a history and the potential to be researched from a historical perspective, and the SIG aims to bring scholars together from across BAM who have an interest in historical methods.
We presented a soccer-mad-boffins paper at BAM at Newcastle last year and will be submitting a paper this year. The 2017 conference takes place at the University of Warwick between the 5th and 7th of September. Both full (5-7,000 word) and developmental (1-2,000 word) papers as well as workshop submissions are welcome. Find out more here https://www.bam.ac.uk/civicrm/event/info?id=3178 and the Management and Business History Track Call for Papers is reproduced below:
Reconnecting management research with the disciplines: shaping the research agenda for the social sciences (BAM 2017)
This track aims to encourage management and business historians who work in business schools and social science departments to engage in constructive debate with a wide range of management scholars. The 2017 conference theme calls for management scholars to re-engage with social science disciplines. This provides an excellent opportunity for management historians to consider the role that history can play in influencing management knowledge and practice, as well as contributing to wider theory in the disciplines of economics, strategy, accounting, finance, law and sociology. In this track we specialise in chronologically or longitudinally motivated research. This year we particularly welcome papers relating to the economic or social history of business or management, or applying archival methodology to a new disciplinary context. We are also interested in context specific papers using more traditional historical methodology but which take innovative approaches to relate their findings to wider social science concerns.
In the spirit of pluralism we also encourage cross-disciplinary papers and workshop submissions that link different Tracks, while the main conference theme ought to feature prominently in all submissions. As a group we are inherently multi-disciplinary and believe in the application of theory to historical analysis, and there is no single epistemology for approaching this. We aim to encourage theoretically orientated social science history with a clear relationship to present day debates in the management discipline.
