 Does History Matter in Business?Paul Tiffany Enterprise & Society, 2009, vol. 10, issue 4, 816-830 Abstract: In 2008 Professor Eric Godelier published a provocative essay in which he concluded that a positive dialogue between business historians and both management scientists and business management practitioners was possible. While the divide between these camps was not trivial, he nevertheless wrote that current events and scholarship was bringing them together, at least as he could observe these trends in the context of emerging French scholarship. In this current review, my own conclusion is the opposite. Management scholarship, in fact, continues to move away from the “soft” approach of the historian and more towards the “rigorous” and quantitatively biased methodology of the management sciences. My essay reviews the background of this development in terms of American business practice and scholarship, as it seeks to demonstrate how the evolution of management training in the United States brought us to the current state of affairs where “hard” drives out soft in almost every encounter. However, while I conclude that this is indeed the current reality, I do not imply any endorsement of this outcome. Rather, I end with a hope that some forms of rapprochement might be possible-yet with an acknowledgement that we will have no definitive answers to this question anytime soon. Date: 2009 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:10:y:2009:i:04:p:816-830_00 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Enterprise & Society from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK. |
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