Abstract
Routine calls for more, and better, contextualization abound in management research. For academic researchers, thin contextualization has been critiqued for generating thin theory with limited explanatory power. For students and practitioners, rich contextualization has been identified as a means of enabling managers to wrestle with ambiguous, complex, multicausal circumstances. Contextualization, as a research method and as a managerial capability, is essential for confronting the socioecological “grand challenges” of our time.
Yet rarely is historical contextualization addressed as a specific means for addressing societal grand challenges. This is surprising, given that the professional discipline of history is methodologically equipped to deal with contingency and variations in context, arguably better than any other discipline. Furthermore, professional historians are trained to use specific techniques for thinking systematically about wicked problems, often at a much larger temporal and / or geographical scale than most social sciences are prepared to tackle given the limits to generalization from incomplete evidence. In this paper we seek to review the current state of theory on contextualization in management studies, demonstrating how drawing on theory and methods from historical studies can advance an agenda for applying historical contextualization to grand challenges. In doing so, we build on recent work urging historians of business and management to move beyond the “uses of the past” and “rhetorical history” approaches. Although such work has usefully reminded management scholars that “history matters,” its limited range of engagement with historical theories and methods has constrained the very rich opportunities provided by multiple modes of historical contextualization for developing more robust theories and concepts of management in an era of “polycrises.”
In particular, we argue that historical contextualization enables two interrelated capabilities relevant to theorization across a broad swath of management research: first, a capacity to robustly identify the most important causal elements in complex, multicausal social circumstances; and second, a capacity for understanding the role of intersubjectivity in explaining otherwise inexplicable social or organizational outcomes. We proceed by addressing how contextualization and grand challenges have been addressed in mainstream management studies to date, assessing strengths and shortcomings in existing approaches. We then draw upon recent work in historical entrepreneurship theory and business history to point to pinpoint theoretical and methodological considerations most relevant to grand challenges. Finally, we briefly explore three examples using historical contextualization to demonstrate potential for addressing grand challenges in strategic management, international business, and in supply chain management.