Introduction to the Special Collection on Revisionist History in Management Research

Abstract

This article introduces the special collection on revisionist history in management research. We asked prominent scholars to reflect on the current state of the research on their chosen topic, and how our field got there through specific decisions they or other researchers made. We also encouraged our authors to engage in counterfactual thinking by imagining how things could have been different. Our contributors offer novel, provocative insights on a variety of topics including organizational identification; emotional labor; resistance to change; territoriality; deviant behavior; and academic careers. In this article we discuss the origins of the special collection, elaborate on our approach to revisionist history, and provide brief overviews of the six papers in the collection. We conclude by discussing how others could build on our approach to revisionist history to provide other valuable lessons for management research.

Given the subject matter of this special collection, it is fitting to begin with a story of a memorable event from our past.

In 2014, Dave was Program Chair for the Western Academy of Management (WAM) meeting in Napa, California, and shared a stage with Blake Ashforth and Sandra Robinson for the conference's Fireside Chat, a regular session featuring an informal conversation with top scholars. During that conversation, Dave asked Blake to share some thoughts about his classic article Social Identity Theory and the Organization, co-authored with Fred Mael (Ashforth & Mael, 1989). His response was surprising: “I don’t think it's a very good paper!” Despite the paper's evident success and high profile, clearly there were things that Blake would have done differently.

Fast forward to several years later.

The two of us—Dave and Simon—had worked together for a few months as co-editors of the Generative Curiosity (GC) section of JMI. One of the criteria for GC submissions is that they must be novel. We had been seeking two types of novel ideas and had been successful at attracting the first type: submissions on topics that had received little to no attention from management researchers, such as human–animal work (Hannah & Robertson, 2017); domestic employment (Masterson & Hoobler, 2019); and workplace bereavement (Bergeron, 2023). But we had largely failed to attract our second preferred type of novel submission, that would “breathe new life into something seemingly tired or outdated” (Stackman & Hannah, 2017, p. 114). We wondered, how could we get authors to examine work from the past and bring new ideas and energy to it? We were encouraged and informed by the many management scholars advocating for historical research methods (e.g., Hargadon & Wadhwani, 2023; Maclean et al., 2016; Rowlinson et al., 2014; Suddaby, 2016), but it wasn’t until Dave came across Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History that something clicked. We became intrigued by the idea of re-examining the past with an eye to “whether we got it right the first time” (“Revisionist History,” n.d.). This idea also brought Blake's response to mind, along with the question: what would he have liked to change if he had the opportunity? We reached out to Blake and Sandra to see if this idea had legs. When they responded enthusiastically, we knew we were on to something. Our special collection on revisionist history began to take shape.

Like Frost and Stablein (1992) in their exploration of exemplary research, we wanted to reveal grounded insights about the research process through a nuanced reflection on prior work. To do so, we sought out scholars who had made important contributions and would be open to revisiting their own pasts, whether with papers they had authored; areas of inquiry they had been associated with; or decisions they made in their careers. We hoped that they would have inside knowledge of past events, as well as expertise that would enable them to generate new insights about specific management topics and the broader research process. In some cases, these scholars invited their co-authors, including doctoral students, to join them on their journey.

What Do We Mean by “Revisionist History?”

The approach to revisionist history we asked our authors to undertake has two complementary components. First, we asked authors to reflect on the current state of the research on their chosen topic, and how our field got there through specific decisions they or other scholars made. This component aligns with the idea of revisionist history as a research methodology. Banner's (2021, p. 16) book (subtitled ‘Why All History is Revisionist History’) defined revisionist history as “any challenge to existing interpretations of any aspect of the past brought about by new evidence, new arguments, new perspectives, or new methods.” Importantly, this understanding of revisionist history does not have the negative or pejorative connotation it is sometimes given in the media or lay conversations. As Wadhwani and Decker (2017, p. 115) argue, we can make significant theoretical progress “by challenging, revising, and replacing previous explanations or constructs within the historiography.” These benefits are illustrated in Wadhwani's (2018) revisionist account of how savings banks originated.

Second, we wanted our authors to ponder what could have happened if different decisions had been made. Movie buffs may recall the 1998 film Sliding Doors, which imagined two different paths its main character's life could take depending on whether or not she caught a train on the London Underground. Similarly, we encouraged our authors to engage in counterfactual thinking, which “involves the imagination of non-factual alternatives to reality” (Markman et al., 1993, p. 87). In the context of historical analysis, it requires us to ask, “What if something else had happened?” Management researchers have long studied counterfactual thinking in organizational contexts (e.g., Morris & Moore, 2000). When used as a research methodology, counterfactual thinking can help us “zoom out, re-focus and contemplate a fresh perspective, when in danger of becoming professionally blinkered” (Wenzlhuemer, 2009, p. 30).

The Six Papers in Our Special Collection

The six papers in our collection cover a range of topics. Blake Ashforth and Fred Mael (2024) describe how in the late 1980s, the traditional employer-employee relationship was in a state of flux as both parties moved towards shorter-term models of employment. They felt that organizational identification—the sense of oneness or belongingness with an organization—was at risk, and should be explicated and better understood. In their revisionist take on their classic paper (Ashforth & Mael, 1989), they share four areas that they wish they had explored in more depth at the time.

First, (inspired by Fred's loyalty to the Boston Red Sox baseball team), they wish they had further explored why individuals feel a need to connect to a collective. Second, their original definition of identification emphasized cognition but omitted internalization and affect, with the latter omission to escape the intellectual clutches of the “organizational commitment police.” They argue affect and internalization are essential to identification and should have been acknowledged as such from the beginning. Third, they lament neglecting other targets of identification besides organizations, such as teams, occupations, and careers, even though these other targets might be more visceral and impactful. Finally, they acknowledge that by drawing on social identity theory (and its “faithful companion” self-categorization theory), they may have contributed to the neglect of other helpful perspectives on identity and identification.

Aqsa Dutli et al. (2024) focus on emotional labor. They argue that two important elements of initial conceptions of emotional labor have fallen by the wayside in recent work: explicit attention on service workers, and an emphasis on display rules in “triggering” the emotional labor process. Among the negative impacts of these shifts is limited attention paid to blue-collar service workers, whose world of work is often characterized by greater precarity and exposure to health and safety risks that were vividly exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Revisiting the history of research on this topic and undertaking a “revive and resubmit” of two of their papers (Gabriel et al., 2015; Trougakos et al., 2015), they unpack various methodological and theoretical reasons for why these two elements have gotten less attention than they deserve, such as greater reliance on tools like MTurk and Prolific to recruit participants, causing researchers to get more and more distant from the samples they wish to study. To chart an alternative vision for the field of emotional labor, they identify a set of specific directions researchers could take, such as studying changes in perceptions about the origins of display rules.

Mara Cable and Jean Bartunek (2024) explore resistance to change. They argue that the field tends to view resistance to change as a hurdle that needs to be proactively addressed by organizations in order for them to achieve their objectives. The authors trace the history of this perspective back to Kurt Lewin's premature passing, the way the researchers misread Coch and French's (1948) seminal study on the topic, and the dominance of positivist epistemologies at the time.

In reflecting on where the field could have gone instead, they draw on insights from the cognitive revolution and social constructionism. Specifically, they advocate for a more interpretivist approach to studying organizational change. Rather than viewing resistance to change as something employers must avoid or overcome, this approach focuses on understanding how different organizational members may have different understandings of change. Mara and Jean illustrate the benefits of this approach by drawing on two of Jean's earlier papers (Bartunek, 1984; Bartunek & Moch, 1987).

Sally Maitlis’s (2024) paper is unique in the collection. It is a personal reflection on her academic journey, and in particular the decision to segment two personal identities: an OB professor and a student, then a practitioner of counseling psychology and psychotherapy. She ponders, should she have kept these two identities separate, or found ways to integrate them?

One of the many compelling points Sally makes is that when she speaks with doctoral students, junior faculty, and others about career choices, she describes being struck by the “…guilty tone with which they speak about their interests, and their pleasure in them, and their wish to integrate them more into their work and lives” (p. 4 of Maitlis (2024)). This reminded Dave of one of his doctoral student colleagues, who was told by their advisor to wait until she had tenure before she studied topics she was genuinely interested in. While this advice may occur to readers as depressing and overly instrumental, this scholar has gone on to have a superb career. Would they have been as successful if they had pursued their passions sooner? As Sally notes of her own circumstances, it's not clear what would have happened in her career had she pursued a different “historical possible self.” Sally's insights illustrate the importance of being clear-eyed about our choices, and calls for our field to broaden our conceptualization of scholarship so that more of us will be rewarded for integrating our passions into our work.

Graham Brown’s (2024) paper looks back at the noteworthy achievement of getting a top-level publication from his dissertation. His co-authored publication on territoriality in organizations (Brown et al., 2005) has been impactful, but not as quickly and not to the degree that he had hoped for. He explores what he could have done differently to give the concept a more effective launch.

Graham's examination of what did (and did not) happen includes three pieces of insightful, practical advice: (a) join a conversation, (b) measurement is key, and (c) be careful what you sacrifice. On the first point, Graham learned that his passion for the topic was not enough to draw attention to it: he needed to connect with other communities of inquiry, and to demonstrate the usefulness of territoriality to their domains of interest. Next, citing the axiom “what gets measured, gets done,” he reveals that once he published a scale measuring territoriality (Brown & Robinson, 2011), citations of his original work tripled. Finally, he laments some of the decisions he made during the process of writing and revising the paper, including a preoccupation with differentiating territoriality from the then-newly published concept of psychological ownership (Pierce et al., 2001), and not maintaining his emphasis on the positive impact of territoriality, a choice that has contributed to subsequent work focusing largely on its negative consequences.

Finally, Sandra Robinson and Rebecca Bennett (2024) paper looks back at their seminal work on deviant behavior in organizations (Bennett & Robinson, 2000; Robinson & Bennett, 1995). They consider whether “workplace deviance” was the right label for their work; whether they should have developed a theoretically derived typology; and the choice to develop a formative scale instead of a reflective one.

On the latter two points, Sandra and Rebecca feel that their choices have hindered research progress. The field continues to proliferate new types of deviant behavior: a recent review identified 91 deviance-related constructs (Zhong & Robinson, 2021). A theory-based typology may have enabled greater consolidation, parsimony, and perhaps clarity. As to the measurement scale, they felt a reflective scale would have been able to capture the full scope of the construct of deviance, be applicable to a wide variety of contexts, and be distinct from the many existing assessments of behavioral deviance. Finally, their exploration of the choice of the label “workplace deviance” should be necessary reading for any scholars introducing new constructs to the field. They contrast the success of the label “counterproductive work behavior” with their own precise but perhaps less “sticky” label.

Lessons Learned and Implications for Management Research

Beyond offering a wealth of insights about important topics in management research, these authors also offer reflections on their experience undertaking revisionist history. When we considered these reflections alongside our own experiences editing this special collection, several implications about our approach to revisionist history—which combined exploring how we got to where we are and imagining where we could have gone instead—came to mind.

First, we are delighted to see the generative potential of this approach realized in the papers in this special collection. As demonstrated herein, it can help us to realize that something has been neglected, or that the literature has traveled in a puzzling direction. Further, this approach can help us unpack how that came to be and then pivot in targeted ways to get back on track. Along the way, we may also generate promising and unexpected research questions, and also come to appreciate how different audiences can come to appreciate a paper's qualities and impact in different ways. As Aqsa, Allison, and John note, this is beneficial whether reflecting on a topic we have a lot of experience with or one we are just beginning to explore.

Second, when we embark on our journey as revisionist historians, it is important to reflect on who we choose as our journey companions. Of course, going it alone is an option: Graham and Sally demonstrate this, and the more personal one's reflections are, the more appropriate a solo reflection might be. However, the experiences of some of our other authors highlight the benefits of having other companions along the way. A natural choice is to collaborate with current or former co-authors. Our authors noted that they and their co-authors often had different recollections of the decisions they had made during the research process, or different opinions about the directions the literature has taken. Those differences can spark generative discussions.

Further, as Mara and Jean note, bringing together a team of researchers at different career stages can be particularly useful. A less experienced collaborator, or an experienced collaborator who is new to the topic, may ask questions that others might overlook, such as “Why did you do that in the first place?” Or “Why has the field picked up on this issue, but not that one?” Prompted to reflect on questions that could fly under the radar, their more senior colleagues might respond with cogent explanations or, in some cases, admit that they do not know. In both cases, this exchange of questions and reflections can help stimulate richer understandings of why we got to where we are, and where we could have gone instead.

Next, when should one undertake a revisionist history? We believe there is not a single right time to engage in these reflections, and different times may yield different benefits. For example, a revisionist reflection shortly after publication may help us tap into nuanced recollections of why we made certain decisions: for example, “did we make this change because we were persuaded by a reviewer's or editor's feedback, or just to get the paper published?” We may also be able to pivot quickly, before a problematic assumption becomes entrenched. However, undertaking a revisionist history after a longer period of time may offer us more perspective, as well as an in depth understanding of how and why the field has evolved. On the other hand, waiting for some time may mean that a move away from original ideas may be a slower, more effortful process. Put another way, as Graham notes, a revisionist history after a brief time may allow for a quick change, but we may only be guessing about where things were going. Waiting longer may provide more certainty about the path ideas have taken, but it may take longer to change course particularly as articles become more entrenched in narratives in the field. From a personal perspective, career milestones, such as applications for reappointment, tenure, and promotion, are natural times for this type of reflection because they already require us to take stock of our careers and plan for the future. For those of us who are later in our careers, we may need to create our own checkpoints to remind us to revisit our own history.

Fourth, we need to create the right forums for revisionist history. Right now, there is limited space in our journals allocated to these kinds of historical reflections. Sometimes, those who write influential articles are invited by journals to reflect on the state of the art. Several journals offer researchers the opportunity to write commentaries on others’ work to stimulate important dialogues. One opportunity to make more space for revisionist histories is to give the authors of the original article the chance to write a commentary themselves if their revisionist reflections can help move the field forward. Additionally, journals can create dedicated sections for these types of reflections from a wide range of authors. As editors of the Generative Curiosity and Provocations and Provocateurs sections of JMI, we see potential for revisionist history submissions to fit with the goals of our sections. Beyond academic journals, we can normalize this approach at our conferences, in brown bag sessions, and in our doctoral seminars, the latter of which is particularly important to help early career scholars see that even the ‘best’ papers could have been different. A revisionist history of an instructor's own work could provide a powerful learning experience for doctoral students, and complement the traditional focus on learning the canonical literature.

Further, this special collection also prompted us to realize that, while it is important to give our classic articles due respect, at times we may tip over into reverence. We should not treat the arguments in classic papers as sacrosanct. The authors of the classic articles referenced in this section were readily able to identify ways in which they could have improved their work. Further, the fact that they were eager to write about these potential improvements illustrates that they did not want their original papers to be the last word about a subject. Our classics should inspire us to explore new ideas and directions, not create orthodoxy.

We were also struck by how classic works often touched on issues that were fundamentally important at that moment in history. In Blake and Fred's case, the relationship between employees and employers was in a state of flux; for Sandra and Rebecca, it was workplace shootings. However, we also note that these issues are also important now. Perhaps one of the factors that determines whether a paper has a long-lasting appeal is whether it touches on an enduring aspect of the human condition. Thus, if we want to maximize the impact of our work, we should be mindful that we are writing at a moment in time, and ask ourselves whether this issue that matters now will also matter in the years to come. This also sheds light on the question of when one should strive to bring one's personal passions into one's scholarly career. As Sally has noted, segmentation is not necessarily a bad thing. But if one has a passion, and that passion is important to the world now and is likely to be important in the future, it may be a good bet to bring it into our own work.

To conclude, we would like to offer our thanks to the friends and colleagues who have joined us on the revisionist history journey. To all of our authors, you have our admiration and our gratitude. Thank you for your enthusiasm when we reached out to you in the first place, for your humility and intelligence as you wrote and rewrote your papers, and your generous feedback on each other's work. To our JMI colleagues Richard Stackman and Donna Sutherland-Smith, thank you for helping us navigate this underexplored territory.