Reframing the past: microhistory’s analytical promise for management and organizational history

What the paper says

This introduction positions microhistory as a promising and underexplored analytical orientation within management and organizational history. Emerging in response to the homogenizing tendencies of macrohistorical grand narratives, microhistory foregrounds contingency, contradiction, and agency through a methodological reduction of scale and a close reading of marginal or fragmented sources. While recent scholarship in business and organization studies has engaged with microhistorical methods, this special issue moves beyond questions of methodology to consider the ontological and epistemological implications of microhistory. In doing so, it reconceptualizes the relationships between micro and macro, agency and structure, context and events, and the particular and the general. The introduction also foregrounds the distinctive ways in which microhistorians trace and interpret sources – such as ego-documents, oral accounts, archival silences, and material traces – revealing how historical knowledge is constructed through interpretive practices that are attuned to ambiguity, resistance, and multi-scalar dynamics. The introduction to the special issue demonstrates how microhistory can open new avenues for theorizing within management and organization studies by deepening our understanding of temporality, materiality, affect, and historical contingencies. Rather than offering generalizations through scale, microhistory insists on specificity as a mode of theorizing, inviting us to reimagine what historical inquiry can do in and for organization studies.