Oscar Javier Montiel Mendez

2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

Abstract: There is a growing interest in the intersection between entrepreneurship, history, and context, to reinvent the history of the former. Mainly, this has been addressed by the individual entrepreneur, the firm, the region where the entrepreneurial experience took place, and the context under these processes was carried out but forgetting the outcomes that were produced because of this. Wadhwani & Lubinski (2017) propose to reinvent entrepreneurial history as a research field, approaching its study on the creative processes that propel economic change. The present proposal focused on an understudied approach in entrepreneurship: artifacts, its outcomes, i.e. products and services, and who are beginning to have attention in the entrepreneurship literature seeing opportunities as artifacts (Berglund, Bousfiha & Mansoori, 2020). Therefore, a conceptual proposal is made from industrial archeology (IA) to potentially analyze and understand the entrepreneurial processes. After an extensive literature review, is proposed to see its process in a backward vista, from the artifacts (products and services, including those digital), taking from IA its methods to analyze them. Thus, it is suggested it is possible from IA to analyze the history of entrepreneurship, as the artifact can give specific and valuable information regarding the processes under which they were conceptualized, design, produced, sold, adapt, or get obsoleted.

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: There have been critiques on the way business history (BH) has evolved, its uses, and abuses (Coleman, 1987). Recently, some calls have been emerging on reimagining business history (Scranton & Fridenson, 2013), viewing it from diverse angles. Although there have been critical writings series (Yeager, 1999) on it, it appears there is a lack of a formal body where, under a critical lens, business history can be enriched and better position itself in front of other academic or public contexts. How best can we critically apprehend the nature of the organization itself, its structure, and to the lived experience on its foundation, work, expansion, reorganization or failure, the whole entrepreneurial processes within? Taking ideas from the Critical Management Studies (CMS) school (Alvesson & Wilmott, 1992), willing to challenge the taken for granted assumptions and institutional prerogatives upon which management has founded its apparent hegemony (Parker, 2002), eclectic by design (Hancock & Tyler, 2004), CMS has combined various schools of post marxism, post-structuralism and contemporary feminist theory for a discernible approach to analyzing management, systematically interrogating its philosophical assumptions, the imperatives, and techniques associated with its practice (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992). There are experiences in pulling CMS into other areas, like family business (Fletcher, 2013), advertising (Hamilton, Bodle & Korin, 2019). The present paper has the purpose of exploring how to adapt the main premises of CMS to BH, where the results should suggest to open new research opportunities to advance in the understanding of management, history, and for the development of public policies.