Ludovic Cailluet

Book Review: Marcelo Bucheli and R. Daniel Wadhwani (eds) Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods

‘Australian Doubles’ is – according to Wikipedia – an informal and unsanctioned form of tennis, in which three players compete. They rotate court position after each game, playing once as a double and once as a single player. Though not a tennis player myself, I can see the fun in this variation of the sport. It is also exactly what is done by Andrew Popp and Robin Holt (2013) in a recent and very inspiring paper. Combining their skills as business historian and organizational theorist, they analyse the correspondence exchanged by John and Elizabeth Shaw, an early 19thcentury entrepreneurial couple in England. Starting with primary sources, like most historians do, Popp and Holt alternately play singles and doubles, using their unique competences and reflecting de facto on each other’s practice. Using almost 200 letters written by the Shaws in the early 1800s, they could have written a neat historical narrative of entrepreneurship. Yet, ‘the lives of the Shaws are far more than plot, even if what lies outside is ordinary, emotional, incidental, and hesitant open experience to which there is no immediate coherence’ (Popp & Holt, 2013). The authors resist the temptation to reconstruct the Shaws’ experience through ready-at-hand conceptual frameworks available in entrepreneurship theory. Instead, they see (and show us) the Shaws not merely as entrepreneurs conducting a grand design geared toward efficiency and profit maximization, but rather as a couple navigating over time the very uncertainty of being. The paper is a clear example of the type of work that animates Marcelo Bucheli and R. Daniel Wadhwani, co-editors of Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Interdisciplinary research, although much lauded by academic institutions and research funding agencies, is a very difficult journey, full of challenges and obstacles. This book is primarily aimed at management scholars willing to undertake this journey and work with historians or use historical methods. Considering the growing interest in historically grounded research in management studies (Clark & Rowlinson, 2004; Rowlinson, Hassard, & Decker, 2013), it is striking that many handbooks in research methodology do not have chapters on ‘history’ or ‘historical perspectives’. This timely book aims to fill this gap by including several diverse perspectives, providing an in-depth exploration of relevant theory as well as apposite methodology. This book is about dialogue between two parties. Nevertheless, to engage in discussion presupposes common grounds, or at least an understanding of each other’s vision of the universe and language. The editors claim they aim for ‘transcending the dialogue of the deaf’ (p. 8) in confronting both disciplines with their own and their common epistemological challenges. Accordingly, they are concerned not only with the why but also with the how of incorporating historical research and reasoning in organization studies. 564321OSS0010.1177/0170840614564321Organization StudiesBook Review book-review2014