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

––––––––––––––––––––– HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF COMPANY DOCUMENTS –––––––––– 309preservation of documents. Even if they are preserved, the minutes of workers’ representatives’meetings, no less than board minutes, generally fail to record the stories from everyday lifethat can be interpreted to reveal the meanings which workers and board members attach totheir experiences. I could find little in the way of personal correspondence, diaries, orunofficial newsletters, which might be more revealing, among the official company documentsin the Cadbury Collection.Periodization emphasizes the singularity of historical events. My periodization of Cadbury,for example, emphasizes the firm’s singularity in its adoption of scientific management aheadof most other British companies (Rowlinson, 1988). According to Dellheim, Cadbury ‘wasnot a typical British firm’, although it is representative of the Quakers in business (1987: 14).By contrast the focus on everyday experience in organizational ethnography is usuallypredicated upon demonstrating typicality rather than singularity. The more singular andsignificant a company is deemed to be for business history, the less usefully typical it becomesfor an organizational ethnography of everyday life.The emphasis upon periodization of events and singularity, as opposed to everyday life andtypicality, has implications for the writing strategy in business history. As Barbara Czarniawskaobserves, organizational ethnographers are able to present findings for an organization which‘may not exist, and yet everything that is said about it may be true . . . that is, it may becredible in the light of other texts’ concerning similar organizations. In an effort to preserveanonymity for informants, and as a result of the stylization which suggests that findings canbe generalized, the texts of organizational ethnographers tend towards ‘fictionalization’(Czarniawska, 1999: 38). Revealing the unique periodization of an organization throughnarrative history derived from company documentation would undermine this fictionalizedtypicality.However, the fictionalization which is permitted in organization studies would beanathema to historians. It is taken for granted by business historians that the organizations theywrite about have actually existed in history, and that their interpretations refer to thedocumentary traces of past events that can be verified through extensive footnotes citingsources. Verification becomes increasingly important if the interpretation of an organization’spast emphasizes its singularity rather than typicality. Footnotes are part of the rhetoric ofhistory (Hexter, 1998). In contrast to organization studies, historians frequently relegate actualdebate with other historians to the footnotes. But more importantly for my argument here,it is in the footnotes that the nature and interpretation of the evidence is laid out. If nonhistorians,including organizational researchers, read historical writing without reference tothe footnotes, then they will miss the implicit debate about sources. The discourse of historycan be described as debate by footnote. Each historian marshals her evidence to support anargument, hoping to bury her opponent under a barrage of footnotes citing superior sources.CONCLUSION ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Qualitative researchers using company documentation face a choice of whether to researchand write in the genre of business history or organization studies. Business history requiresan extensive trawl through a mass of documentation whereas in organization studies anintensive analysis of a limited selection of documents is likely to be acceptable (for example,Forster, 1994). In organization studies, an account of the research methodology is required,