No dia 14 de maio, entre as 13h00 e as 14h00, tem lugar uma sessão dos ISEG Research Seminars. O oradora convidado será Daniel Raff, da Wharton School da Universidade da Pensilvânia.
Os Seminários ISEG Research decorrem semanalmente, às quartas-feiras, contando com a participação de docentes do ISEG, bem como de outras instituições de ensino nacionais e internacionais.
Title
Historical Thinking as Analysis, Business History, and Management Education
Abstract
Business history often seems to get little respect amongst 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 these 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 opportunities valuable 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.
