[SIGCIS-Members] What can SIGCIS learn methodologically from the history of science, environmental history, etc?

Thu Oct 15 02:11:32 PDT 2015

For  a copule of years now, business historians have made an effort to communicate that their is a method in their workings to colleagues in other parts of business and management. Some resources around this initiative:

Organizational History Network http://www.orghist.com

Key readings are

Bucheli, M. and R. D. Wadhwani (2014). Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Rowlinson, M., J. Hassard and S. Decker (2014). "Research Strategies for Organizational History: A Dialogue Between Historical Theory and Organization Theory." Academy of Management Review 39(3): 250-274.

Others include

de Jong, A. and D. M. Higgins (2015). "New Business History?" Business History 57(1): 1-4.

de Jong, A., D. M. Higgins and H. van Drielc (2015). "Towards a New Business History?" Business History 57(1): 5-29.

Decker, S. (2013). "The Silence of the Archives: Postcolonialism and Business History." Management and Organisational History 8(2): 155-173.

Decker, S. (2014). "Solid Intentions: An Archival Ethnography of Corporate Architecture and Organizational Remembering." Organization 21(4): 514-542.

Decker, S., M. Kipping and R. D. Wadhwani (2015). "New Business Histories! Plurality in Business History Research Methods." Business History 57(1): 30-40.

Eloranta, J., O. Jari and H. Valtonen (2010). "Quantitative methods in business history: An impossible equation?" Management & Organizational History 5(1): 79-107.

Larsson, M., L. Magnusson and K. Ullenhag (2014). "Scholarship in Business History." Business History 56(1): 1-4.

Best wishes
Bernardo
(Bangor University, Wales)

On 15 Oct 2015, at 10:01, Ksenia Tatarchenko <ktatarchenko at yahoo.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
> I would like to add a pragmatic comment along the same line as James. Working on Soviet history I am particularly vulnerable to problems of communicating my research results effectively and would be interested in learning from the successful models in our field. How about organizing a round-table around the texts artfully combining such methodologies: following the thread I am thinking about the winners such as Arguments that Count and "When technology became language: the origins of the linguistic conception of computer programming, 1950-1960."
> Ksenia
> 
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> De : James Cortada <jcortada at umn.edu>
> À : "thaigh at computer.org" <thaigh at computer.org> 
> Cc : sigcis <members at sigcis.org> 
> Envoyé le : Jeudi 15 octobre 2015 4h51
> Objet : Re: [SIGCIS-Members] What can SIGCIS learn methodologically from the history of science, environmental history, etc?
> 
> I agree that it was a solid session.  Nathan delivered one of the finest and most important lectures on computing that I have heard in a long iime.  I agree that scholars of computing need to expand their contextual comments, especially since an increasing number of historians in many fields are recognizing the importance of IT in their domains.
> 
> I have a suggestion for the young scholars: make sure your commentators receive your papers or slides long in advance of a session, not one, two or three days before you present so that they can aply their thinking thoughtfylly to your work.  What I am suggesting is how highly experienced scholars operate routinely.  
> 
> Bottom line: Good session, loved the growing number of participants.  A great shout out to th organizers.
> 
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 5:32 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Dear SIGCIS,
>  
> We just had a wonderful meeting, which I could enjoy all the more as it was the first of the seven SIGCIS workshops where I had no operational responsibilities. Nathan really did a great job with the keynote, and it was splendid to see so many people making the transition from list membership to physical participation at SHOT and SIGCIS for the first time. Better still were the people who had been “first timers” in 2013 or 2014 coming back for a second meeting, as this proves they found the experience useful. I think we accounted for a very significant fraction of the overall graduate student attendance at SHOT.
>  
> My impression was that the research and delivery of the SIGCIS papers held up pretty well against the quality of material in most parts of the main SHOT program. However I also heard a suggestion from one person that many of the papers in both venues tended to be very narrowly framed, telling a particular story without really engaging with a broader literature or being explicit about what general lessons or methodological implications the work holds.
>  
> To the extent that this is true, one could see an aversion to explicit historiography and to the drawing of broad conclusions as a kind of aesthetic preference rather than a failing of craft or scholarship. Still, I was wondering if list members might be able to suggest recent (say post-2010) papers from other traditions that are effective in using a focused historical study to make a compelling case that we should think differently about a topic of broad interest to the field in question. I’m not thinking necessarily about work related to IT, since the literature in many areas of history of science, environmental history, history of medicine, and other fields is more mature and appears to have developed a clearer sense of what the “big questions” are. However I have had few opportunities since grad school to read systematically in other literatures.
>  
> So list members, please post away with your nominations of recent articles from other fields with an explanation of what cool thing you think the article is doing methodologically that those of us writing on the history of computing could learn from.
>  
> Best wishes,
>  
> Tom
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> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> James W. Cortada
> Senior Research Fellow
> Charles Babbage Institute
> University of Minnesota
> jcortada at umn.edu
> 608-274-6382
> 
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

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