On 14 May, A session of the ISEG Research Seminars will take place between 1pm and 2pm. The guest speaker will be Daniel Raff, from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
The ISEG Research Seminars are held every week on Wednesdays, with the participation of professors from ISEG, as well as from other Portuguese and international educational institutions.
Title
Historical Thinking as Analysis, Business History, and Management Education
Abstract
Business history often seems to get little respect among quantitative social science-oriented management academics. Its narratives are said to be convenient just-so stories. Its subjects are no more than “anecdata” i.e. anecdotes masquerading as statistically validated central tendencies of validly random samples. History written by professionals for professionals in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is not like the annals recorded by medieval monks: it is not merely descriptive but also fundamentally analytical in nature. Longitudinal accounts of the life courses of individual firms and industries represent a fertile field for analytical treatment. Management academics (and their students!) take a natural interest in cases of extreme outcomes-be they spectacular successes or dramatic failures-rather than those of average performers. I will argue that teaching business history as applied strategy, focusing on what might broadly be called mechanism in examples salient for one reason or another, offers valuable opportunities in teaching as well as in research, opportunities which are complementary to the sort offered by work presented e.g. at the annual meetings of the Strategic Management Society or published in the Strategic Management Journal. The talk will develop a helpful overall perspective and give precision to some useful concepts.
