essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

24 –––– Historical Analysis of Company Documents ––––––––Michael RowlinsonThere are increasing calls for a historical perspective in organization studies. The hope is that a‘historic turn’ might help to make the study of organizations less deterministic and more ethical,humanistic and managerially relevant (Clark and Rowlinson, forthcoming). In this chapter I usethe example of my own research on the extensive collection of historical documents held byCadbury, the British chocolate company, to explore issues to be considered when analysingcompany documents from a historical perspective. My intention is to address the question of whyhistorical analysis of company documents is rarely pursued as a research strategy by organizationalresearchers. The discussion is organized around the theme of exploring the differences betweenorganization studies and business history, starting with a series of misconceptions concerningarchival research on the part of organizational researchers. Then I contrast the problem ofperiodization in business history with the focus on everyday life in qualitative organizationalethnography and how this affects writing strategies in history and organization studies.ORGANIZATION STUDIES AND BUSINESS HISTORY ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Considering their common interest in business organizations, dialogue between qualitativeorganizational researchers and business historians concerning theory and methods is relativelylimited. This is partly because business history, which can be defined as ‘the systematic studyof individual firms on the basis of their business records’ (Tosh, 1991: 95; Coleman, 1987:142), and is virtually synonymous with the historical analysis of company documentation, ischaracterized by a lack of methodological reflection. This is a characteristic of history ingeneral, as Hayden White, one of the most influential philosophers of history, observes:History is rather a craftlike discipline, which means that it tends to be governed byconvention and custom rather than by methodology and theory and to utilize ordinaryor natural languages for the description of its objects of study and representation of thehistorian’s thought about those objects. (1995: 243)Qualitative researchers in organization studies are expected to justify their methodology,whereas business historians do not have to contend with a high expectation that they can andwill account for their methodological approach. Business history remains resolutely empiricistand atheoretical in the sense that its conceptualizations and claims are relatively unexaminedand, unlike organization studies, it lacks an ostentatiously theoretical language. Businesshistorians verge on assuming that their interpretation of company documents is commonsense, and therefore their procedure needs no explanation (Rowlinson, 2001: 15).The preference in qualitative organization studies, especially organizational culture studies,