The letter is the formal mechanism for communication in the business community. Even contemporary advances in electronic mail have not yet displaced the legitimacy invested in this form of correspondence. However, its very functionality has detached it from the fabric of its social history. This...

The objective of this paper is to explore the entities that have developed private farms (trang trai) in Vietnam. Various types of private farms have emerged in the last ten years. It is noteworthy that the owners of private farms are not necessarily agricultural households but also include...

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...

This paper analyzes some of the characteristics of Spanish capitalism between 1917 and 1970. For that purpose, we resort to the technique known as interlocking directorates and applies the methodology of social network analysis (SNA) to the board of directors of the 210 largest Spanish...

Serves as an introduction to the special issue on the strategic use of the past and future in organizations published in the Journal of Organizational Change Management . The issue of how organizations and their members appropriate the past and future in the context of organizational identity is...

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,...