Speaker: David Kirsch (Maryland)
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Time:
- Wednesday, October 16
- 10 am (EST) / 3 pm (London) / 7 pm (Tashkent)
- This webinar is scheduled for 90 minutes, including the Q&A.
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Registration: Please register here to receive a personalized Zoom link and a reminder prior to the event.
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This talk will explore the increasing prominence and use of historical methods in management research. In recent years, management scholars have turned to historical methods to uncover how organisations and industries evolve, how past events and decisions shape contemporary organisational behaviour, and how institutional and cultural legacies influence management practices. I will discuss some of the many ways in which historical methods are being used in management and organisational research, highlighting exemplar studies as well as potential pitfalls that scholars may encounter, and conclude with recommendations for how to decide whether and where to use historical methods.
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Suggested readings:
- Decker, S., Foster, W. M., & Giovannoni, E. (2023). Handbook of Historical Methods for Management. Edward Elgar Publishing.
- Pillai, S. D., Goldfarb, B., & Kirsch, D. (2024). Lovely and likely: Using historical methods to improve inference to the best explanation in strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 45(8), 1539–1566.
- Wadhwani, R. D., Suddaby, R., Mordhorst, M., & Popp, A. (2018). History as organizing: Uses of the past in organization studies. Organization Studies, 39(12), 1663–1683.
- Wadhwani, R. D., Kirsch, D., Welter, F., Gartner, W. B., & Jones, G. G. (2020). Context, time, and change: Historical approaches to entrepreneurship research. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 14(1), 3–19.
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About the speaker
David A. Kirsch is Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. He received his PhD in history from Stanford University in 1996. His research interests include industry emergence, technological choice, technological failure and the role of entrepreneurship in the emergence of new industries. Kirsch is also interested in methodological problems associated with historical scholarship in the digital age. With the support of grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Library of Congress, he is currently building a digital archive of the Dot Com Era that will preserve at-risk, born-digital content about business and culture during the late 1990s.
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Ibrat Djabbarov
Imperial College London
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