Rethinking Historical Methods in Organizations: Organizational Source Criticism

This workshop has been organised by the Sustainable Growth, Business, Work and Economic Productivity (SBE) and is open to all ESRC and non-ESRC funded PhD and MA Social Research students within the WRDTP’s seven partner universities.

In a recent paper in Organization Studies (Heller, 2023), Professor Michael Heller introduced the methodology and concept of organizational source criticism (OSM). This is based on the foundational historical methodology of source criticism that examines issues of bias, veracity and reliability in historical sources, which are examined by historians during the course of archival research and form the basis of historical narrativization: the basic outputs of the historian. OSM adapts source criticism to organizational archives and aims at discovering veracity (proof) and meaning (hermeneutics and intentionality) in organizational sources. It also emphasizes the plurality of organizational sources and argues that one can find four types of sources in the organizational archive based on their genre and modality. Each of these types of source requires a source criticism which is attuned to their specificities. The seminar will present the paper and its findings, including the Organizational Source Criticism Matrix and will discuss in more depth certain themes which were introduced in the paper. The seminar will be of value for anyone doing research in organizational archives or who is interested in questions of historical methodology and historiography.

Pre-reading

Michael Heller (2023). ‘Rethinking Historical Methods in Organization Studies: Organizational Source Criticism’, Organization Studies 44(6): 987-1002.

Dr Michael Heller
Divisional Lead / Reader - Marketing
Dr Michael Heller is a business and marketing historian whose main areas of research cover the history of office work, the history of company magazines and internal communication, the history of public communications, corporate communication, and corporate and product branding. His work has been published in Organization Studies, British Journal of Management, European Journal of Marketing, Enterprise and Society, Business History and other leading management and business history journals.He is the Principal Investigator for an ESRC £629,897 Grant, 'An Institutional History of Internal Communications in the United Kingdom'.