This paper attempts to address the recent call for an historic turn in management and organization studies: that of how to do history and represent the past of the field. To this end, we begin by stressing the need to theorize the past. We develop and describe a concept that we term relationalism, which draws on the sociology of knowledge (SoK) as well as select facets of an approach that has been developed through an engagement with the SoK, that of actor-network theory. The paper offers a theoretical discussion of relationalism as a way of theorizing the past and the past-as-history as an alternative to realism and relativism. We seek an empirical demonstration of relationalism through exploring the wide dispersion and numerous linguistic translations of the work of a scholar who was instrumental in the development of the SoK, that of Max Weber. Relationalism calls for interrogating the politics of representing the past, tracing actors symmetrically and surfacing the past-as-history in its multiplicity. Telling the past relationally calls for an exploration of the tensions between different modes of knowing. To this end, we offer it as a moral alternative.
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