History in management learning: A multi-temporal reflexive approach

Abstract

This article explores the role of history in management learning. Our starting point is the notion of historical reflexivity, which promotes a non-linear analysis of what becomes taken-for-granted, acknowledging that past, present and future are bound up with the historical development of management and organization. Our analysis recalibrates historical reflexivity to emphasize its multi-temporal character, examining how multi-temporal reflexivity impacts on the practice, performance and future-directed vision of individual managers. We approach this from the perspective of three practising managers: entrepreneurs based in Northeast England, who built up a business which they later sold, before turning to philanthropy. All three had experienced in their personal history lingering painful episodes that exerted ongoing influence in the present and future. We show that multi-temporal reflexivity is intrinsically multi-level, as reflexive learning gleaned from formative personal experience is redirected towards the organization, community and society, harnessed to build positive social futures for others.

Introduction

This article contributes to the 55th Anniversary special issue of Management Learning, which aspires to offer a set of critical reviews and reflections on topics that have featured prominently in the journal over its long history. The topic we have selected for this endeavour is the role of history in management learning (Smith, 2007). History is written for the present, and will likely be amended again in the future (Cummings and Bridgman, 2016). In this sense, history evolves to maintain its relevance over time, such that history and contemporary times appear inseparable. Considered thus, history is an approach that promotes reflexive practice (Durepos et al., 2020; Prasad and Śliwa, 2022).

The notion of historical reflexivity resonates with many important papers published in this journal over the past 55 years. Management Learning styles itself as ‘the journal of critical reflexive scholarship on organisation and learning’. As such, it is rooted in a lengthy and growing tradition of showcasing critical reflexive scholarship pertaining to management education and learning. Building on the burgeoning publications on reflexivity and temporality that have featured in the pages of this journal (e.g. Cope, 2003; Corlett, 2013; Cunliffe, 2002; Durepos et al., 2020; Jordan, 2010; Maclean et al., 2012), we take as our starting point the notion of historical reflexivity advanced by Reynolds and Vince (2020). Reynolds and Vince refer (2020) to themselves here as the ‘history boys’, reflecting back on their own long relationship with the journal. Historical reflexivity refers to ‘a non-chronological analysis of what becomes taken for granted, by recognising that the past, present and future are all implicated in the historical construction of management and organisation’ (Reynolds and Vince, 2020: 139). Cunliffe’s (2016) definition of reflexive practice, subsequently amended, is as ‘subjective understandings of reality as a basis for thinking more critically about the impact of our assumptions, values, and actions on others’ (p. 701). Mobilizing history is key to this approach (Durepos et al., 2020), requiring the cultivation of historical consciousness on the part of management learners (Tennent et al., 2020). Reminiscences engender future action (Coraiola et al., 2021), as behaviour is fine-tuned through the cultivation of reflexivity (Hibbert, 2015). This emphasizes a non-linear temporal multiplicity or ‘multiple temporalities’ (Mutch, 2018: 243), whereby the past is filtered through the lens of the present with an eye to the future, as ‘the here and now provides an immediate social context for past experience, and a container within which past experience is both reflected on and transformed’ (Vince, 1998: 308). Reflexivity is thus not an abstract construct but one which holds potentially far-reaching consequences for managers and their organizations.

However, as Durepos and Vince (2021) observe, the advantages of blending ideas of reflexivity with history remain underdeveloped, both conceptually and empirically. Here, we take up the challenge to explore historical reflexivity as ‘an iterative process of reflection in which people create nonchronological narratives of their past, present and future practices, informed by their embodied history’ (Durepos and Vince, 2021: 40). We do so from the perspective of three practising managers – entrepreneurs who built up a business, sold it and then became philanthropic. As ‘relational, reflexive, and moral practitioners’ (Cunliffe, 2016: 741), the managers whose careers we explore here exhibit a need to stay relevant as their careers unfold, including in their respective communities. Our analysis recalibrates historical reflexivity to emphasize its multi-temporal character (Maclean et al., 2023). Nominally, historical research on management and organization, which draws on the past and influences the present, is increasingly revealed as being carried through time to inform the future (Koselleck, 2004). We show multi-temporal reflexivity to be intrinsically multi-level, as reflexive learning gleaned from personal experience is subsequently redirected towards other spheres, including the organization, community and society-at-large. Multi-temporal reflexivity thus affects personal, organizational and societal domains. The guiding research question we pose is thus: how does multi-temporal reflexivity impact on the management practices, performances and future-directed visions of individual managers?

We define multi-temporal reflexivity as the capacity of an actor, drawing on multiple temporal significations, to construct practical understandings of the location of the self within an ever-changing social system, to act accordingly, and to refine understandings in response to unfolding events and actions taken. This explanation revisits our previous definition of reflexivity to accommodate a fresh, multi-temporal orientation (Maclean et al., 2012: 388). Multi-temporality thus refers to the coexistence in the mind of an actor of reflections, memories and associated emotions relating to personally significant events in the near and more distant past that together inform the unfolding future. Such reflections, reminiscences and emotions stem from the experience of history, personal and organizational, and are invoked reflexively as an integral part of interpreting events in the present and making decisions that impact the future.

We develop the argument that the value of history in management learning lies not in lessons that might be gleaned from formal histories, but rather in personal, organizational and societal experiences of history as a source of multi-temporal reflexivity. In what follows, we explore the literature on reflexivity in relation to temporality. Next, we explain our methodology. We then present our findings, making our case through reference to the careers and oral testimonies of three entrepreneurs: the co-founder of a large software group; the co-founder of a food service distribution company; and the former owner-manager of a large car dealership. We conclude by discussing our conceptual contribution, and proposing a reflexive roadmap for management learning scholarship.

History and reflexivity

It is important to distinguish between the experience of history and history as an academic product (Down, 2001). Formal histories are accounts of past phenomena based on arguments justified by appeal to surviving data (Maclean et al., 2016). Conversely, the term experience of history refers to the thoughts and feelings of individuals about personally meaningful events that occurred sometime before the present. Such events may be experienced directly or more remotely, but critical reflection on them is fundamental to reflexivity and management learning (Cunliffe, 2016). We hold that managers learn not from experience per se (Kolb, 1983; Vince, 1998), but from developing and adapting their practices dynamically as they draw lessons based on their experience of history. This is the process described by the construct of multi-temporal reflexivity.

History may be experienced by managers in three main ways. First, they may have experienced or played a role in a past event or sequence of events of consequence for themselves. This may be referred to as personal experience of history (Maclean et al., 2012). Second, they may have become familiar with a past event or sequence of events of consequence for their organization. This may be referred to as organizational experience of history (Janssen, 2013). Third, they may have become familiar with a past event or sequence of events of consequence for society-at-large. This may be referred to as societal experience of history (Bastien et al., 2021). Personal, organizational and societal experiences of history coexist in the present in the memories of individual managers, serving as a potential source of multi-temporal reflexivity. When confronted with a problem, the ‘reflective practitioner’ (Schön, 1983) analyses patterns and competing possibilities, and in doing so their personal, organizational and societal experiences of history constitute potentially valuable sensemaking and sensegiving resources (Cunliffe, 2002).

Central to the concept of reflexivity is the idea of ‘striking moments’ (Corlett, 2013) in which emotional dissonance is experienced as new realizations emerge, form and take shape (Cunliffe, 2004; Durepos and Vince, 2021; Jordan, 2010). Salient learning events may be painful (Hibbert et al., 2015), involving learning from mistakes. Yet such incidences can also prove formative by inducing individuals to alter their self-view. What comes across in accounts of such episodes is their temporal and historical character, and the effect of recollection in instigating self-reflexivity and learning. Managing a business is often a ‘turbulent and non-linear process’ (Cope, 2003: 445). The emotional intensity occasioned by discontinuous events for personal and business life – for example, personal tragedy or business failure – can nevertheless be transformational, contributing to ‘higher-level learning’ (Cope, 2003). The pain experienced during such crises can prove redemptive, serving as a catalyst for future-directed positive action (Hibbert et al., 2015).

Research process

Entrepreneurship offers a unique context in which to study reflexive learning (Cope, 2003). Entrepreneurs who later apply their skills to philanthropy – moving from the personal to the organizational and societal domains – have much to tell us about multi-temporal reflexivity. The life-history interviews of three entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists on which we draw here form part of a wider project on philanthropy in Northeast UK (Harvey et al., 2019; Harvey and Maclean, 2023; Maclean et al., 2013; Price et al., 2023), conducted over the past decade. This article is founded on qualitative research informed by reflective life-history interviews. Such interviews are intrinsically multi-temporal and multi-domain, being ‘embedded in the past, present, and future, and within broader company, industry, and community narratives’ (Cunliffe et al., 2004: 265). Hence, they ‘offer a way to invent the future’ by drawing on previous narrations, current emplotments, and future potentialities (Cunliffe et al., 2004: 265). Given constraints of space, we explore the reflexive accounts of just three entrepreneurs who have become involved in creating positive futures for children, teenagers and young adults. The participants have been given pseudonyms to ensure confidentiality. The interview process is naturally participative; all life-history interviews consisting of ‘negotiated accounts embedded in subjectively experienced moments of time and context’ (Cunliffe et al., 2004: 275). We now present thumbnail sketches of our three participants, eliciting the salient points of their personal journeys to illuminate our concept of multi-temporal reflexivity.

Multi-temporal reflexivity in action

Our first interviewee, George, co-founded a large software business in Northeast England. He describes himself as a practical individual who accomplishes everything ‘by the seat of my pants’, without planning. It was only when he sold his business that he claims to have realized he was well-off:

We never planned [software company] to be a business that grew so big. It was always, ‘Can we pay the mortgage? Can we get a season ticket for Newcastle? Can I have a nice holiday?’ I’m lucky, I can do those things.

Initially, George’s philanthropy was reactive rather than proactive. This changed when he experienced the personal trauma of one of his twin daughters being born with a defective heart. He recounts this episode as follows:

It turned out that she had no primary artery in her heart, she had a hole in her heart and the veins from her lungs to her heart went to the wrong side of her heart. . . So, when she was born, she had open heart surgery at two days old. Then at six months she got a clot in her artery. . . and they put her on a life support machine, and they said we had 22 minutes to decide whether she lived or died. Then at two years old, she had a major operation to transfer the veins to the right side of the heart and close the hole. It was a nine-hour operation and she survived.

From this close brush with personal tragedy, George developed a new, future-directed outlook on life, establishing a foundation to educate and inspire young children:

It’s because of that that I created my foundation, to help other people who have similar issues and problems, and also because . . . I got a great start to life, so I want to help educate and inspire young children in the Northeast to be as lucky as I am.

While George admits that there is still a haphazard element to his philanthropy, putting something back into the community matters to him, considering it his duty to create positive futures for children, through drop-in or music therapy centres:

I also believe that because of my success I should be putting something back into the community, because I came from nothing. I didn’t have a silver spoon in my mouth . . . working-class background, a coal miner and a seamstress running a boarding house . . . My belief is that I should be helping other people.

Here, George summarizes what it means to him to help local children survive and thrive:

So, if you walk into the paediatric intensive care unit at [local] hospital, you’ll see young children, some babies, some four, five-year-olds, covered in wires, and you think, ‘I’m helping them to survive’. You go to a school for disabled kids, and you see them being able to write and read and listen to stories, listen to music, and have a smile on their face . . . I bought a hydrotherapy pool, a jacuzzi, for a place in North Shields, and this was for disabled kids who’d got their legs in callipers to go out for the day, take the callipers off and go in the hydro pool and just have bubbles going on their legs. And . . . the look on their faces was fantastic.

Our second research participant, Bob, co-founded a food distribution business. Bob believes in second chances, having been allowed to return to a secondary school from which he had previously been expelled. He claims only to learn from mistakes. Realizing early on that working for someone else was ‘a complete mug’s game’, he established a food distribution business with a partner, operating from a room in a farmhouse, supplying food to local pubs. Bob experienced ‘rock bottom’ when his fledgling business went bust. When the car he was travelling in broke down, he and his partner were stranded on the M62 motorway for four hours. Bob recounts the significance of this critical episode, which he describes as a moment of ‘divine intervention’:

After a year, we went bust and we decided to pack it in, and as an economy we thought well, we’ll drive home together in the same car to save a bit of petrol, and we got stuck on the M62 . . . You know, I do believe in divine intervention . . . We were four hours stuck just outside Worsley . . . and by the time the four hours was up we’d talked ourselves into giving it another go, and we stopped giving credit, it was only cash. We got rid of all the staff, there was only one . . . and we said well, we’ll do all that ourselves . . . We started this in 1984, and we sold it in 1995, at which stage we were turning over £200 million.

The pain of business failure, culminating in breaking down on the motorway, proved to be a critical turning point. Interpreting being stranded as a divine message, Bob and his partner resolved to give their business another go on better terms. His account of the motorway episode evokes the ‘turn again, Whittington’ moment attributed to Dick Whittington, Lord Mayor of London in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, now the stuff of legend and pantomime, who from a poverty-stricken background went on to fund public projects, including installing drinking fountains and providing for unmarried mothers (Casson and Casson, 2019). Centuries later, the charity to which he legated his fortune remains active.

Becoming wealthy through the sale of his business, however, did not bring Bob the fulfilment he expected: ‘I thought I’d climbed the mountain of a balanced life, and when I got to the summit, it just didn’t look great’. What he describes as a life-changing moment on the road to Damascus occurred on being invited to chair a youth club:

I went along to this place, and it was like the proverbial road to Damascus. I mean, I had a completely life changing event. I went in, I saw this club full of very scary kids, but they’re just really nice, having a great time. They’re the kids that would scare me in groups. It looked like a business and the premises were nothing like I expected as a youth club. We expect ping pong and a village hall and about two or three kids on the very edge of society, nothing around, and maybe one volunteer. They had 300 kids in.

Surprising himself, Bob agreed to get involved with the club without a moment’s forethought: ‘I said, “I’ll do it”. I was astounded’. He has since replicated the youth club model across the North. He deals, he claims, in the ‘currency of confidence’, imparting social confidence to teenagers who may not have had the best start in life:

The currency we work in is confidence, you know, that is what we’re investing in our kids and that is the outcome. That is the currency. I want their currency to be, they come away and they have something about them, their horizons are lifted, and they’ve just got something about them in the way that all of us who have been lucky in life have had people at key moments all along the way.

The expansion of youth zones helps to counteract rising levels of knife crime in deprived areas by providing, Bob explains, ‘a safe and inspiring place [for teenagers] to go in their leisure time, so they’re safe and they’re inspired’.

Interestingly, Bob claims to evaluate his charitable and business ventures through his mother’s eyes, drawing on his personal relationship with his late mother to ensure his current and future endeavours measure up: ‘She is the benchmark, she’s the litmus test, would mum approve? It’s a great business mantra, everything you do. . . is you think of it you’re serving your mother’.

Our third interviewee, Patrick, became the owner-manager of a large car dealership business located in a former coal-mining village in Northeast England. Patrick struggled at school with literacy problems: ‘When I had to read out loud in the class, I was ridiculed because I couldn’t pronounce the words’. Leaving school with one O level, he joined his father’s small Ford dealership. He did every task available: ‘I set about sweeping the floors, washing cars. I was a mechanic, eventually a paint sprayer and a panel beater. I served the petrol, did everything because there were only six staff . . . I ended up selling cars’. Discovering a love of selling cars, Patrick determined to sell nice cars:

So, I said to Ford I wanted another franchise. They said as long as it doesn’t compete with Ford you can have anything you like, they said what did you want? I said, well, what I really want is Aston Martin. So, I mean everybody laughed themselves silly, in a mining village, in the Northeast of England, you want to be an Aston Martin dealer? I said yes . . . I think I can sell Aston Martin.

Patrick set out to dispel the image of the ‘dodgy’ car dealer personified by television character Arthur Daley. He endeavoured to instil a set of values into his staff, giving them Sundays off despite it being the most popular day to buy a car. Against the odds, he became ‘the top Aston Martin dealer in the world for the next five years’. Franchises with Ferrari, Rolls Royce, and Lotus followed.

After floating the company in 1989, Patrick was asked to become involved in turning around failing schools. The pain he had experienced through his literacy difficulties motivated his decision to accept:

I had such a bad time at school that I thought, you cannot have this . . . I wanted to make sure nobody else felt the pain of it. I still feel the pain now. I mean, if I read a book, I can’t remember what was on the first page when I get to the third page.

Teachers, Patrick felt, had to be inspirational, because there is no dress rehearsal for children’s education:

We have one opportunity to educate our children. It’s not a dress rehearsal, we can’t say we will go back and run that year again, we have to be the very best in every subject, in every area, in every classroom that we can be. And if we’re not we’re failing the children, we’re failing our futures.

Striving to improve education led Patrick to reflect on those in the care system, and to ponder what happened to them when they left. An acquaintance invited him to visit a young offenders institution. During the visit, Patrick enquired how many inmates were ex-care leavers, and what became of them when they left the institution:

So, I asked the Governor when I got there, I said . . . you’ve got 450 guys in here at the moment, how many of them were ex-care leavers? She said 65%. I said, dear me, where do they go when they come out? Well, she said, see that roundabout, that’s about as far as they get because they come back, because they’ve got no family to come out to, no home to come out to, and no job to come out to.

The visit proved formative for Patrick, a moment in which he was ‘struck’ (Corlett, 2013), inducing a sense that this was his destiny: ‘So, I thought, that must be why I’m here, to do something about that’. His response was to purchase a large house and to set about providing for ex-prisoners the three things they needed most: a home, a job and a community to belong to:

So, I got stuck in and I bought the ex-bishop’s house in [local town], and I’ve got 40 guys in there who are guys that were living on the streets, folks who were in prison, in and out of prison all the time, mainly drug and alcohol addicted guys. And we get them off the drink and off the drugs, they find a home to live in, they find a community to belong to, and they find meaningful work, which is the three things they want. So, I built a factory unit in the grounds where we refurbish furniture that we import from Europe, and we sell it in shops.

Patrick has been able to change the expected life course of a growing number of ex-offenders, breaking the cycle of reoffence. Interestingly, what might appear to be a novel intervention on his part, the social rehabilitation of former prisoners, is not as contemporary as it seems, but has historical roots; the philanthropy of entrepreneurs targeting the reform of criminals and the destitute as far back as medieval times (Casson and Casson, 2019).

Discussion and conclusion

Our contribution in this article is to take the concept of historical reflexivity (Durepos and Vince, 2021; Reynolds and Vince, 2020), which remains conceptually and empirically underdeveloped, and to show that it is intrinsically multi-temporal. While extant research tends to emphasize the personal aspect of historical reflexivity (e.g. Cope, 2003; Corlett, 2013; Cunliffe, 2002; Durepos et al., 2020; Jordan, 2010; Maclean et al., 2012), we show that multi-temporal reflexivity is multi-level, moving beyond the self, from the personal to the organizational and societal domain, where it becomes redirected towards others, the community and society.

Reflexive practice entails learning from personal history, through past, sometimes painful events, coupled with an inclination to ‘realign the self towards future encounters’ (Hibbert et al., 2015: 814). These seminal moments do not evaporate after the event, but remain with individuals, where they continue to exert influence in the present and future. All three entrepreneurs whose experiences are related here had encountered difficult personal moments in the past, including the near-death of a child, business failure and the ridicule of illiteracy. All three came to realize that they could improve the futures of others by learning from and reapplying past personal lessons in a broader domain. The uncertainty experienced in such critical moments – as Bob enquires at one point, ‘Quo vadis?’, where am I going to? – creates the necessary tension that leads the reflexive practitioner to discern how a socially directed, meaningful future might play out. The 22 minutes George was given to decide if his daughter lived or died have permeated the remainder of his active life. Now, when he sees children in hospital ‘covered in wires’, he has the reassurance of knowing he is helping them to survive. The communal reach of the futures these actors instigate is crucial to their ongoing personal development. As Bob observes, looking out from the summit of the proverbial mountain he had climbed, ‘it just didn’t look great’. Only when their future is oriented towards changing the experiences of others by reapplying lessons derived from historical experience, personal and organizational, do things improve. As Patrick reflects when visiting the young offenders institution, ‘that must be why I’m here, to do something about that’.

Organizational life comprises ‘multiple interpretations at multiple points in time and in multiple contexts’ (Cunliffe et al., 2004: 271). Hence, organizational existence engenders temporal multiplicity as meaning and practices are carried forward across time (Mutch, 2018, 2021). Earlier we enquired, how does multi-temporal reflexivity impact on the management practices, performances and future-directed visions of individual managers? We suggest that the critical moments recounted here are inherently multi-temporal because each is informed by past events while containing the unfolding future of the individual practitioner in the present. The learning which takes place in these formative moments is suffused with personal pain overlaid by mastery of the organizational sphere in which the practitioner has learned to operate, which provides the competence and know-how to succeed in a new field of action. The change that emerges from such episodes draws on personal historical learning experiences observed through the filter of organizational realities specific to the individual, which together give rise to multi-temporal reflexivity directed towards the community and beyond.

Our contribution to this Anniversary special issue thus points to future directions for Management Learning scholarship. First of all, we call for more historically reflexive work on management learning, which contains untapped potential to contribute to management education scholarship in the present and future. The current interest in temporality in management and organizational research opens new avenues for exploring the future of management learning in relation to its past. More specifically, our article highlights the need for multi-temporal, multi-layered perspectives on personal and organizational learning processes in ways which inform the socio-educational wellbeing of wider communities. Such a research agenda resonates with the ‘ontological empathy’ advocated by Prasad and Śliwa (2022) by recognizing that the personal, professional and societal are not mutually exclusive domains but on the contrary are mutually constitutive, suffusing one another in unexpected ways, as we illustrate here.