Conceptualizing historical organization studies

© 2016 Academy of Management Review. The promise of a closer union between organizational and historical research has long been recognized. However, its potential remains unfulfilled: The authenticity of theory development expected by organization studies and the authenticity of historical veracity required by historical research place exceptional conceptual and empirical demands on researchers. We elaborate the idea of historical organization studies-organizational research that draws extensively on historical data, methods, and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines. Building on prior research, we propose a typology of four differing conceptions of history in organizational research: History as evaluating, explicating, conceptualizing, and narrating. We identify five principles of historical organization studies-dual integrity, pluralistic understanding, representational truth, context sensitivity, and theoretical fluency-and illustrate our typology holistically from the perspective of institutional entrepreneurship. We explore practical avenues for a creative synthesis, drawing examples from social movement research and microhistory. Historically informed theoretical narratives whose validity derives from both historical veracity and conceptual rigor afford dual integrity that enhances scholarly legitimacy, enriching understanding of historical, contemporary, and future-directed social realities

Dynamically Integrating Knowledge in Teams: Transforming Resources into Performance

In knowledge-based environments, teams must develop a systematic approach to integrating knowledge resources throughout the course of projects in order to perform effectively. Yet, many teams fail to do so. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, we examine how teams can develop a knowledge-integration capability to dynamically integrate members‘ resources into higher performance. We distinguish among three sets of resources: relational, experiential, and structural, and propose that they differentially influence a team‘s knowledge-integration capability. We test our theoretical framework using data on knowledge workers in professional services, and discuss implications for research and practice

A memoir and reflection: knowledge and an evolutionary theory of the multinational firm 10 years later

The production of the 1993 article awarded the JIBS Decade Award was written during a time when ideas regarding knowledge and the international expansion of the firm confronted a hostile audience. The sources of these ideas were directly related in Winter's and Roger's prior work, but also to a broader literature on ‘category errors’ and technology transfer. The theory of the firm as a social community is a distinctly sociological theory and, though sharing many key ideas with the resource-based view that developed at the same time, is deeply opposed to engineering conceptions of firms as Lego-modular pieces that can be easily shifted, bought, and sold. We describe our individual biographies and the subsequent intellectual development of the concepts in our article. Journal of International Business Studies (2003) 34, 505–515. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400066