The historic turn in organization studies has led to greater appreciation of the potential contribution from historical research. However, there is increasing emphasis on integrating history into organization studies, rather than on recognizing how accommodating history might require a reorientation. As a result, key conceptual and methodological insights from historiography have been overlooked or at times misrepresented. We identify four modes of enquiry that highlight distinctions from history about ‘how to conceptualize’ and ‘how to research’ the past. First, historical organization studies research the past primarily through reference to archival sources. Second, retrospective organizational history reconstructs the past principally from retrospective accounts, such as those generated in oral history. Third, retrospective organizational memory uses ethnography and interviews to explore the role of memory in the present. Fourth, historical organizational memory traces the institutionalization of organizational memory through archival research. From the analysis, we argue that historical organization studies are increasingly established, and interest in ‘uses of the past’ has contributed to the rise of retrospective organizational memory. However, historiographical reflexivity – a new concept for organization studies – focuses attention on engaging with both history and collective memory, and on the distinct methodological choices between archival and retrospective methods.

Organizations remember through narratives and storytelling. The articles in this Special Issue explore the interface between organization studies, memory studies, and historiography. They focus on the practices for organizational remembering. Taken together, the articles explore the similarities and differences between ethnographic and historical methods for studying memory in organizations, which represents a contribution to the historic turn in organization studies.

This article reviews the evidence presented by those alleging bias in the rating of accounting journals in the ABS Guide to Journal Quality in Business and Management Studies. Drawing upon a wider range of citation metrics and international journal ranking schemes, the analysis presented covers all the accounting journals listed in the current 2010 version of the ABS Guide. The evidence of bias based on the mean RAE 2008 GPA scores for institutions and on the 'world elite count' as published in the guide is rejected. The simplistic comparison of the proportion of grade '4' journals in accounting relative to other subject areas is rejected as evidence of bias and the preferred method reveals that the ABS Guide provides the accounting subject area with one more grade '4' journal and seven more grade '3' journals than might otherwise be expected. There is no evidence that the use of Thomson-Reuters citation data in the process of constructing the ABS Guide has been detrimental to accounting journals. The accounting journals in the ABS Guide have lower mean scores on almost all citation metrics when compared to other subject area journals with the same ABS grade. A detailed comparison of the ranking of accounting journals in seven international journal ranking lists fails to find evidence of bias against accounting journals and suggests that grade '3' accounting journals have been favorably rated. In a detailed comparison of accounting and business history journals, there is little evidence from any source reviewed to suggest that Accounting History is of the same quality rank as Business History or that Accounting History clearly warrants a higher ABS Guide rating. The conclusion is that the evidence presented supports the view that the ABS Guide has not been biased in its rating of accounting journals. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

This Rejoinder responds to criticisms made by Simon Hussain (2011) about the construction and operation of the Association of Business Schools' (ABS) Academic Journal Quality Guide. In this paper the broad purposes of journal lists and guides are outlined before an account is given of the long history and multiple forms of these lists, particularly in the field of Accounting. Having described the main features of different types of journal list, the advantages and benefits of the approach adopted in the compilation of the ABS Journal Quality Guide is outlined. The paper then ends by noting that one of the copy-editing mistakes identified by Dr Hussain has been rectified, but the remaining concerns about the rating of accounting education and accounting history journals reflect the absence of these titles from journal citation reports and international journal lists. Furthermore, the lower rating of Accounting & Finance research in the RAE2008 in comparison with Business & Management Studies research in the same year and Accounting & Finance research in 2001, has more to do with the way in which the Accounting & Finance Panel calibrated and normalized its judgements than with the ratings contained within the ABS Guide. © 2011 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

How is it that a collection of working class drifters, sociology graduates, and ex-leftist politicos have ended up teaching in UK business schools? Understanding the predicament of these ‘critters’ helps to explain the ironic contingencies that provide the conditions of possibility for institutionalizing critical management studies (CMS), in particular the historic ‘defeat of the Left’ and the lack of more practical activities for radical management academics. Unlike labour process theory (LPT), CMS has come to terms with its institutional location within business schools and has taken the opportunity provided by the continued expansion of research oriented UK business schools to institutionalize itself as a recognized business school constituency. This has even led to the creation of one or two critically oriented business schools in the UK, where the contradictions of CMS are played out. One such contradiction is that having provided an opening for a wider academic and leftist intellectual community to enter the business school, CMS now finds itself faced with an autonomist critique which insists that the mainstream management curriculum is ‘worthless’ and calls for nothing less than the abolition of business schools. Consideration of this critique provides an opportunity to explore the identity of critters and the cultural performativity of CMS in providing a sign for their disaffiliation from the business school.

The ABS list is one of the most widely used journal quality lists available. It is pluralistic and comprehensive, and is widely seen as capturing the consensus in relation to journal ratings. As editors of the ABS list we are concerned at recent calls for a moratorium, or even the abolition of journal quality lists. These calls reinforce the elitist view that the tacit knowledge of where to publish should not be made explicit in lists. © the Author(s) 2011.

Organizational Memory Studies (OMS) is limited by its managerialist, presentist preoccupation with the utility of memory for knowledge management. The dominant model of memory in OMS is that of a storage bin. But this model has been rejected by psychologists because it overlooks the distinctly human subjective experience of remembering, i.e. episodic memory. OMS also fails to take account of the specific social and historical contexts of organizational memory. The methodological individualism that is prevalent in OMS makes it difficult to engage with the rapidly expanding sociological and historical literature in social memory studies, where a more social constructionist approach to ‘collective memory’ is generally favoured. However, for its part social memory studies derived from Maurice Halbwachs neglects organizations, focusing primarily on the nation as a mnemonic community. From a critical perspective organizations can be seen as appropriating society’s memory through corporate sites of memory such as historical visitor attractions and corporate museums. There is scope for a sociological and historical reorientation within OMS, drawing on social memory studies and focusing on corporate sites of memory, such as the Henry Ford museum complex, as well as the mnemonic role of founders and beginnings in organizations. Taking a social constructionist, collectivist approach to social remembering in organizations allows connections to be made between memory and other research programmes, such as organizational culture studies.

PurposeThis paper seeks to identify and define the genre of corporate history within the pervasive historical discourse produced by and about organizations which tells the past of an organization across a multiplicity of texts: published works – commissioned and critical accounts, academic tomes and glossy coffee‐table books – as well as web pages, annual reports and promotional pamphlets.Design/methodology/approachThe approach takes the form of systematic reading of historical narratives for 85 mainly British and US companies from the Fortune Global 500. For these companies, a search was carried out for US printed sources in the British Library and a survey was conducted of historical content in web pages.FindingsFrom extensive reading of the historical discourse, recurrent formal features (medium, authorship, publication, paratext and imagery) and elements of thematic content (narrative, characters, cultural paradigms and business success), which together define the genre of corporate history, have been identified. Such a definition provides competence in the reading of historical narratives of organizations and raises questions regarding the role of history in organizational identity, memory and communication. In conclusion it is argued that the interpretation of corporate history cannot be reduced to its promotional function for organizations.Research limitations/implicationsThe list of the formal features and thematic content of corporate history detailed here is by no means exhaustive. They are not variables, but signs, which, in various combinations, compose the narrative and signify the genre.Practical implicationsIt seems likely that coffee‐table books will increasingly replace academic commissioned histories, with consultants professionalizing the discourse and formalizing the genre of corporate history.Originality/valueThe genre of corporate history has hitherto been neglected in organization theory, where the linguistic turn has led to a preoccupation with talk as text. The use of genre to analyse corporate history represents a textual turn to literary organizational texts as text.

New evidence from a British electronics plant on the experience of
a harmonisation programme is presented and questions the generally
accepted favourable image of moves towards single status working. The
presentation is novel in that instead of offering a traditional
literature review followed by the empirical data, the article develops
two forms of case description. The first case is a fictional
“Composite” account derived from previously published
materials in which we have assembled the key themes into a single
narrative to convey an image of harmonisation as it is presented in the
literature. This can then be compared with the more contradictory
experience of harmonisation found during ethnographic research at the
Collaborating Company, where management was more constrained and the
process was not conflict free. The two cases can be read as a contrast
between image and reality which then needs to be explained.