The goal of this panel is to explore the challenges that arise at the intersection of different disciplines as they attempt to tell complex stories about business. The underlying rationale is as follows: Sources and methods for business historians have expanded in recent years as more and increasingly heterogeneous artifacts are being generated (Rosenzweig, 2003; Kirsch, 2009). On the one hand, these developments have led to a flowering of new types of inputs for historians writing about business such as digitized newspapers and remotely accessible archival collections. Combined with complex search tools that allow scholars to filter ever larger and more diverse sets of historical materials, business historians are now able to make new and different kinds of knowledge claims. However, taking advantage of these opportunities can require research tools which are outside the skillset of any single researcher, historian or otherwise. Therefore, business historians may need to look outside the boundaries of the field for productive, knowledge-generating partnerships.
In this spirit, the panel will feature scholars in fields adjacent to business history (in this instance, information science (Prof. Douglas Oard, UMD) and organization science (Prof. Timothy Hannigan, Alberta) who are also struggling with the problem of "telling complex stories" but are doing so with different tools and to answer different questions. In the process of so doing, however, these scholars are engaged with business historians as collaborators and partners. Therefore, the "story" of the panel is two-fold: first, adjacent fields are facing similar problems to those confronting business historians writing in the digital age, and second, these adjacent fields are natural allies with business history in helping address the challenge of "telling complex stories."
Speakers will include:
Timothy Hannigan (Alberta) - Prof. Hannigan was trained as an org theorist at Oxford with Marc Ventresca and uses computational social science (especially variations of topic modeling) to study construction of narrative. He is currently working on a paper using these methods to explore a phenomenon he calls "Reverse History" that looks at the mechanisms by which organizations selectively render the past to frame it for contemporary purposes. Prof. Hannigan has provided the following abstract:
RENDERING REVERSE HISTORIES:
TOPIC MODELING OF INCLUSION AND PRIVACY IN ORGANIZATION FIELDS
Reverse histories – the selective rendering of truths using narratives grounded in historical data–are frequently used to persuade organizational (and societal members) of how to handle pressing issues. Common to all such histories is the attempt to identify and read historical threads backwards - from the recent period to distant past or from the near future to the current reality – and to package that reading in resonant form of narrative. Because of the importance of the issue, there is also a search for simple, compelling solutions based on facts and truths. The large amount and velocity of data in today’s organizations has enhanced such narrative construction, making it ever more important to understand the nature and implications of reverse histories for organizational processes, especially strategizing. We theorize reverse histories by examining their varieties and generating versions using topic modeling of large data. Through these inductive and abductive exercises, we identify several types of narratives, including the quite common, negative forms - recreating enemies, public bullying, scapegoating and excluding. Mechanisms for reverse history creation include rapid recycling, radical recombination, and repurposing, all enabled by the processing of big textual data. The persuasiveness of such histories depend on reframing and sensegiving.
Douglas Oard (UMD) - Prof. Oard is affiliated with the i-School with a shared appointment in the Department of Computer Science. Prof. Oard has been involved with many projects that involve making sense of large text corpora, including oral history (MALACH), Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), and e-discovery (through TREC). Prof. Oard is interested in the similarities facing journalists, intelligence analysts and historians with respect to processing large-scale collections of data (or archives, in our parlance). He has several ongoing projects that address the challenge of "telling complex stories"; his presentation will situate his current work by looking at how researchers can and should interpret email as a source of evidence.
David Kirsch (UMD) - Prof. Kirsch will present findings from his project entitled "How startups end" which examines the intra-organizational processes that result in the failure of venture-backed startup companies. The project is unique in several respects: first, most research in entrepreneurship examines the startup process, rather than the most common outcome of entrepreneurship, failure. Second, the analysis exploits the availability of complete email archives of failed startups to understand the turning points in the venture lifecycle. Third, the collections developed represent new artifacts for business historians who have heretofore had access only to piecemeal collections.
[We are still searching for a commentator for this session; it would probably be suitable to have the audience function in this capacity.]
Kirsch, D. A. (2009). The record of business and the future of business history: Establishing a public interest in private business records. Library trends, 57(3), 352-370.
Rosenzweig, R. (2003). Scarcity or abundance? Preserving the past in a digital era. The American Historical Review, 108(3), 735-762.