Purpose – This paper seeks to provide a brief overview of what is business history as an academic discipline, with some reflection about its evolutionary patterns and heuristic value in other fields, as for instance, management studies. A peculiar and increasingly practised subfield of...

Attempts to contextualize the current high level of interest in business process re‐engineering (BPR) in UK business and industry. Reviews a number of surveys of UK business involvement with BPR and suggests long‐term secular trends in the business environment of Western firms that seem...

Purpose – This paper seeks to examine why and how M&A activity has been used by UK hotel companies over a 26‐year period and aims to provide a preliminary exploration of its relative success, given that the M&A literature suggests high failure rates or M&A transactions which do not achieve...

Accounting for organizational history is essential to any change process. We argue, however, that the intentional revision of that history also can be important. We treat history as malleable, because events and actions from the past are susceptible to reinterpretation as organizations try to...

Purpose – This paper seeks to identify and define the genre of corporate history within the pervasive historical discourse produced by and about organizations which tells the past of an organization across a multiplicity of texts: published works – commissioned and critical accounts,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore and identify the causes of the failure of the Larkin Company (Buffalo, NY), once one of the nation's largest mail‐order houses in the decades surrounding 1900. Design/methodology/approach – Borrowing conceptual frameworks from both recent...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins and the business model of department stores in Mexico between 1891 and 1910. Design/methodology/approach – Primary and secondary source material support an historical and comparative study of retailing and marketing evolution in a...

Purpose – Focusing on the early development of the three major forms of local advertising employed by independent department stores across the USA – newspapers, radio, and television – this paper examines continuity in the industry's commercial use of new technologies....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine retailer response to the use of alternative currency, or scrip, as an emergency measure during the Great Depression. Advocates of scrip argue that it would help recovery efforts, encouraging consumer spending and keeping dollars “at home”...