ABSTRACT Although the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWSM) – a broad-based mobilization responding to concerns about inequality and accountability – was short-lived as a protest mobilization and often dismissed as lacking strategic direction, it articulated a sustained critique that continues to shape how corporate power and inequality are publicly debated. Drawing on a systematic analysis of 36 issues of six publications produced during OWSM occupations across the United States, this study revisits the movement’s historical legacy by reconstructing how it framed and advanced a corporate-focused delegitimation discourse. The analysis identifies a central frame organized around the notion of undue corporate societal domination, supported by a consistent diagnostic framing that attributes corporate illegitimacy to political capture, economic deception, and cultural pollution. It also reveals an unsettled prognostic framing, divided between reformist orientations aimed at regulating corporate power and radical positions calling for its dismantling. Distinct from movements organized around specific policy demands, we show that the OWSM’s historical significance lay in its capacity to sustain an open-ended critique that questioned corporate legitimacy across multiple societal spheres. The study advances theorizing on corporate delegitimation by demonstrating how diagnostic and prognostic frames mobilized distinct challenges to corporations’ evaluative and cognitive legitimacy.

ABSTRACT In this anniversary essay, we argue that the traditional, often sterile methods of historical investigation in management- and organizational history have left out some of the most essential ingredients: creativity, empathy, emotions and collectivity. These human traits, we suggest, are not just nice to have. They are critical components of any serious historian’s toolkit. Far too often, historical analysis is seen as a purely rational exercise, devoid of the messy, emotional engagement that is key to historical methods. We challenge this notion, proposing that creativity, emotions, intuition, and collectivity are not just incidental. They are heuristics that allow historians to uncover and nuance the past. We humorously, yet seriously, advocate for a more human-centered approach to historical inquiry, one that embraces the full spectrum of human traits that drive us to uncover, understand, and sometimes even fall in love with the past. So, as we celebrate another milestone for Management and Organizational History, we would like its future authors and contributors to remember that historical investigation is not just a science, but an inherently human endeavor – one that thrives on empathy, creativity, and the occasional unplanned discovery.

ABSTRACT The International Monetary Fund (IMF or the Fund) is an organization responsible for stabilizing the international monetary system. To this end, the IMF manages its members’ balance of payments problems by providing conditional loans. Through conditionality, the IMF monitors national economic policies. This study examines the historical origins of IMF conditionality, focusing on the Fund’s human capital: (1) specialized knowledge to examine members’ problems and design corrective measures, and (2) ability to consult with borrowers. The findings are as follows: (1) the Fund’s Research Department staff developed adjustment theories that became a key component of IMF conditionality; (2) the Managing Directors introduced the practice of conditional lending driven by bureaucratic motivation for the Fund’s organizational prosperity; (3) the Fund’s staff reviewed lending procedures through annual consultations; and (4) the Fund’s human capital played a key role in shaping the practical basis of IMF conditionality. Most related research has emphasized the influence of the United States on IMF conditionality. This study, however, shows that the U.S. could not create conditionality without the participation of the IMF’s staff. The results of this study offer a new insight into the debate on financial oversight from an international perspective.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the history of entrepreneurship education (EE) in the United Kingdom (UK), exploring different forms and types as they have emerged over time. The study uses a wide range of sources, including both secondary (e.g. published papers, historical records of specific programmes, and enterprise policy documents) and primary accounts that document the lived experience of educators. It constructs these sources into a chronology, identifies different types of practice and constructs these into four primary forms. From this work, the paper presents an enhanced understanding of entrepreneurship education. It synthesizes influential types, illustrating how and why practice has evolved, and concludes by arguing for a more sustainable pathway via a new approach of ‘Harmonious Entrepreneurship Education.’

ABSTRACT This study investigated the history of family business elite education in Finland. It focused on family entrepreneurs who achieved the highest national business elite status between 1809 and 1945 and their successive generations. It explored the characteristics of their education within the framework of educational pathways. Data were sourced from the National Biography, which enabled the selection and examination of families belonging to the business elite up to the fifth generation. The results revealed that the family entrepreneurs and their successors focused on successor upbringing and competitive continuity in the family business. Their educational pathways, shaped by formal and informal education, varied in terms of the unique cultural contexts of their family dynasties. The families employed diverse strategies, including informal conservative education, self-education, growth-oriented education, family wealth governance, higher education-focused learning, industrial education, and elite education pathways. These pathways mirror first-generation family entrepreneurs’ education, the second generation’s evolving educational requirements (in succession, internationalization, and growth), and the third and subsequent generations (in corporate governance and wealth creation). While there were changes in educational needs and content across generations and contexts, this study underscores the importance of educational pathways in conceptualizing the educational history of family businesses.

ABSTRACT Critical Organizational History (COH) lacks a reflexive discussion about its ontological possibilities. This article fills this gap through a comparative analysis of Foucault’s and Deleuze’s late philosophies of history. It offers a reflexive analysis about the ontological possibilities for COH by translating Foucault’s and Deleuze’s views of actualization and events in ways that inform COH. First, the ‘new metaphysics of history’ developed by Foucault stresses the importance of the continuous reopening of the present through events, which then defines specific attitudes, subjectivation, and care as ethics as the focus of historical work. Second, a ‘post-historical metaphysics,’ as elaborated by Deleuze, reflects a more asubjective stance, in which the post-historical move remains metaphysical. Images, aberrant movements, machines and agencements mediate the fluid becoming of experience, which is primary locus of history and critique. Both routes emphasize the role of critique as actualization and eventalization, thus continuously opening and bordering the present. An example of worker surveillance illustrates Foucault’s and Deleuze’s views on actualization, eventalization, and their approach of history. This article uncovers an interesting confluence of these approaches for organization scholars, namely, through the combination of events with non-events stressing the importance of absences and silences in critical descriptions.

ABSTRACT This article traces Howard Scott’s technocracy movement in the United States from the 1930s onwards, attempting to rearticulate it as a moment in interwar non-conformism. Conceived in America’s culture of material affluence, the technocracy movement was intellectually based on two fin-de-siècle undercurrents: the scientific management movement and Veblen’s institutional economics. The technocracy movement appropriated and developed their ideas of efficiency and waste, attempting to negotiate a space between industrial capitalism and socialism by offering new ideas of managing society based on maximizing productive efficiency and minimizing waste. While its political disorganization and Scott’s spotty past turned brief success into ultimate failure, the speed and intensity of the popular following for technocracy testifies to the broad appeal of 1930s non-conformism. Further, responding to looming unemployment in the pursuit of efficiency through mechanization, the technocracy presented, if accidentally, an ecological vision manifest in the idea of energy certificates. Yet, the fundamentally productivist premise of the movement ultimately marred its substantive development and made the movement fragmented and functionally appropriated.

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to show how an entrepreneurial project that identifies a future form of value may not be motivated by the search for personal financial gain. Based on the new entrepreneurial history framework, the paper analyzes the process by which FC Barcelona was created and consolidated, at a time when football was strictly amateur in nature. It was an entrepreneurial project deployed in a dynamic process based on trial and error characterized by three decisive entrepreneurial momentums: the creation of the club in 1899; its rebirth in 1908; and the construction of a large stadium in 1922. From uncertain beginnings, the club’s eventual consolidation led to long-term socio-economic change and presents the main characteristics of a Schumpeterian creative response since it was key in the introduction of a sport that changed the way in which leisure was consumed in Spain.

ABSTRACT Material culture can offer profitable primary sources for business historians, as several scholars have shown. This essay builds from a workshop held during the 2022 Business History Conference Mid-Year meeting, intended to challenge participants to rethink traditional sources through material culture methodologies. Broadly, the workshop asked participants to consider how material culture methods might amplify the use of ‘traditional’ business history sources (such as account books and advertisements). Here, the author offers a methodological framework for analyzing material culture in order to illustrate the utility of an object-centered approach when writing business history.

ABSTRACT Entrepreneurship is at the heart of new developments that often lead to the creation of new industries. This study examines the origins of the canning industry via the experiences of three of its earliest entrepreneurs: Edward Wright, William Numsen, and Thomas Kensett II. The narrative examines key aspects of the industry’s context including the growth in demand for preserved foods, the resources of the Chesapeake region, and the development of food preservation technology. Using the five characteristics of entrepreneurial processes, the importance of entrepreneurs in the development of the economic growth of Baltimore’s early canning industry is examined. Each founder exhibited entrepreneurial characteristics in different ways. One failed in his efforts; the other two succeeded in developing businesses that endured into the next century. The study reveals that using entrepreneurial processes does not guarantee success, and that there are various paths to success. An entrepreneurial multiplier effect was also evident in the growth of firms producing supplies and equipment for canners. Using an entrepreneurial lens offers a closer insight into the development of firms and their industries. Some remaining unanswered questions as well as avenues for future studies are discussed.