Abstract

"Interviewing Entrepreneurs and Managers in the Andean Region: Learning Business while Doing History"

Beatriz Rodríguez-Satizábal, Universidad del Pacífico (bh.rodriguezs@up.edu.pe)

The twenty-first century has renewed debates about the interconnection of three key spheres within business history: academic research, education, and practice. This paper argues that the articulation of these spheres can advance through three complementary approaches: (1) reflecting on the role of historical thinking in addressing contemporary challenges; (2) fostering historical thinking and the insights derived from historical research within business school curricula; and (3) promoting historical thinking, memory, and oral history as vehicles for historically informed perspectives among practitioners and decision-makers in firms. These approaches are examined through the lens of the subfield of applied [business] history, which has gained increasing prominence worldwide over the past decade and has been developed as both a research agenda and a pedagogical framework by the Business History Research Group at Universidad EAFIT, Colombia, since 2021. The paper makes three main contributions. First, it provides a synthesis of the current theoretical and methodological advances—as well as the existing limitations—within the subfield of applied business history. Second, it presents preliminary findings from the graded course assignment Research/Consulting in Applied Business History, based on interviews conducted by students with general managers and decision-makers from companies of various sizes, mostly located in Colombia, over the past two years within the undergraduate course Business History at EAFIT University’s School of Management. Third, it outlines potential research directions to further consolidate applied business history and strengthen its articulation with academic research, management education, and business practice.