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Business history as a subject is now host to a range of competing research agendas in terms of which cognate disciplines to engage with: management studies, economics, or its former institutional home, history. On the back of recent and significant new contributions to debates over the use of history within business and management studies (in particular, organisation studies), this article identifies, and appraises, the criticisms of business and management scholars, and historians, of each other’s respective gaps in approaches. In particular we consider the perception of historians as being anti-theory and of having methodological shortcomings; and business and management scholars displaying insufficient attention to historical context and their own privileging of certain social science methods over others. These are explored through an examination of three subjects where calls for more historical research have recently been made: strategy; international business; and entrepreneurship. Responding to calls in these fields, and extending work in the field of organisational studies, we propose a framework for advancing the use of history within business and management studies more generally through greater understanding of historical perspectives and methodologies.

This paper draws on the author’s forthcoming monograph and associated work to address the subject of management employees in the Scottish coal mining industry. With a few exceptions, colliery managers and other mining professionals – referred to collectively here as the mine management professions- have been excluded from the history of the British, and particularly the Scottish, coal mining industries. e work contributes to redressing that imbalance by examining these groups within the most crucial period of their ascendancy, 1930–1966, in the Scottish coal industry. It places them within the context of both private and state ownership and examines their role, status and behaviours through their relationship with their employers, and the prosecution of their functions in the fields of production, health and safety and industrial relations. It also examines their terms and conditions of employment and outlook of their professional associations, and, in the nineteen years under nationalisation, that of their union. is coincided with an intense public discussion, within the mining professions, over their future shape, principles and occupational standards. In so doing the author’s work repositions the mine management professions as distinct from, rather than simply an adjunct to, their employers. However, it shows the parameters within which mining professionals were constrained by both private colliery companies and the National Coal Board. Mining professionals’ outlook and behaviours, like other social groupings within the industry, were permeated with both common themes and a diversity of approach., Moving the Social, Vol 36 (2006): Forschungen und Forschungsberichte

This article examines British coal owners’ use of medical and scientific knowledge of occupational lung diseases in the mining industry to resist regulatory changes between 1918 and 1946. It explores the strategies deployed by coal owners in response to scientific and lay debates over the hazard to workers’ health presented by dust, and legislation to compensate miners for pneumoconiosis and silicosis contracted in the nation’s collieries. In particular, it investigates coal owner deployment of the views of notable scientists, especially the eminent physiologist John Scott Haldane (1860–1936), who insisted on the harmlessness of coal dust, in order to avoid costly compensation payments, as well as capital investment in ameliorative measures to reduce miners’ exposure to such hazards. In so doing, the article provides new insights by illustrating how coal owners influenced mining education programmes, deploying the arguments of Haldane and others, with direct implications for health and safety in British mines. This contributed to the mounting public health disaster wrought by coal dust on Britain’s mining communities. This process is viewed as part of the broader political activities of the coal owners – and their industry body, the Mining Association of Great Britain – in its attempts to influence the regulatory process in a period of dramatic change in the political economy of coal. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.

For much of the twentieth-century, aluminium producers enjoyed a close relationship with national governments, not least as prominent players in military-industrial complexes (for example, Anderson 1951; Smith 1988; Grinberg and Hachez-Leroy 1997). This paper explores the ideological motivations and political activities of senior figures within Britain’s dominant native aluminium producer for much of the twentieth-century, the British Aluminium Company Ltd. (BACo), drawing on work by the author (Perchard 2007, 2010). As a company self-styled as ‘the Service’, support within BACo for imperial priorities and patrician values was sustained both by commercial imperatives as well as the social and cultural background of many of the directors (until the 1960s), amongst them hereditary landowners, retired senior military officers and latterly senior civil servants. This paper will examine the political activities of directors collectively and individually through their engagement with power elites (Mills 1956). In particular, it will focus upon the areas of imperial defence, and regional development in the Scottish Highlands (where BACo’s main smelters were based), to illustrate how their involvement in political activities and social networks was both self-serving and governed by instinctive values. In so doing it will also comment upon the ‘revolving door’ between public and private spheres. While calling into question the general application of the notion of a ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ order, this paper accords with Larry Butler’s view of imperial mining concerns and the British metropolitan government’s priorities during decolonization that: ‘it may, rather, be more accurate to speak of temporary convergences of interest’ (Butler 2007: 477; Cain and Hopkins 1987).