Stephanie Decker
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 80483 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Stephanie Decker |
| PRENOMES | Stephanie |
| SOBRENOME | Decker |
| ASSINATURA | DECKER S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Aston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0547-9594 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 390 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2005 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Reclaiming history in IB research
The eternal adolescent? An interdisciplinary meta-narrative review of African business history
Research in African business history is not extensive but highly multi-disciplinary. Our review focuses on publications in key business and economic history journals to better understand the research themes favoured by these two disciplines. We follow a systematic review approach by clearly describing our search strategy and developing a definition of the field with explicit criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Through a meta-narrative approach,…
Christina Lubinski. Navigating Nationalism in Global Enterprise
Conceptualising methodological diversity among born-digital users
The benefits of AI technologies in archival preservation are well recognised, though questions remain about their integration into existing processes. AI also shows promise for enhancing user experience and discovery in accessing born-digital materials. However, a limited understanding of the diverse methodological needs surrounding born-digital access risks the creation of one-size-fits-all solutions that suit certain approaches and research que…
Silence of the archives redux
This reflective essay revisits my 2013 article, ‘The Silence of the Archives,’ to explore its origins, reception, and continuing relevance for management and organizational history. I discuss the epistemic and methodological debates that shaped the original piece, including historiographical traditions, postcolonial theory, and the challenges of interdisciplinary engagement. The essay considers the ‘after-history’ of the article, particularly in …
Minding the gaps
Business historians researching postcolonial contexts contend with archival biases and gaps, even more so than those in general archival research, due to the impact of imperial power dynamics on document creation, collection, and retention. These archival silences hinder the development of nuanced and inclusive historical accounts, frustrating historical understanding of diverse pasts. This article argues that triangulation – a methodological str…
Exploring business history of the Middle East and North Africa region
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has witnessed modern growth. It is seen to be one of the world’s emerging business and economic regions, with much happening recently. However, the ME
The institutional development of Islamic finance in the Middle East
The Islamic finance sector has experienced rapid growth since its commercialisation in the 1970s. For many Muslim countries that gained independence from their colonial rulers, developing a financial industry that represented their faith and value belief systems gave the population a sense of identity. In our study, we traced the historical development of the Islamic finance sector in the Middle East. We applied a post-colonial perspective and th…
A microhistory of architecture historical imagination and the Bauhaus
In this paper, we develop the notion of historical imagination as a methodological practice in microhistory. The relevance of microhistory for organization research goes beyond the focus on the small scale, as its methods involve tracing the sources that allow us to reconstruct lived experience. We use the Bauhaus School as a case study to illustrate how microhistorical methods and historical imagination can reconstruct the perception and impact …
Taking stock and moving forward
This editorial reflects on the research published in Business History in the last few years in the context of wider discussions in the field of business history. In particular, we consider the authors and their thematic orientation, reflection on the geographic and disciplinary distribution and gender balance in the field. Articles published cluster around specific time periods, countries and regions, with early modern or medieval history, and re…
Human resource management in the age of generative artificial intelligence
ChatGPT and its variants that use generative artificial intelligence (AI) models have rapidly become a focal point in academic and media discussions about their potential benefits and drawbacks across various sectors of the economy, democracy, society, and environment. It remains unclear whether these technologies result in job displacement or creation, or if they merely shift human labour by generating new, potentially trivial or practically irr…
Using born-digital archives for business history
Historians of business and management increasingly conduct research in digital archives. This article reviews some of the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of born-digital archives. As an example, we focus on scholarly use of large-scale organizational e-mail collections. In addition to allowing researchers to answer traditional questions about innovation, strategy and organizational development, e-mail also permits more granul…
Using digital sources
As historians start researching the late twentieth century, they are increasingly finding traces of the past created digitally. At the same time, use of computers to digitise analogue material means that many pre-digital sources have been reproduced digitally. As such, future historical research will increasingly include digital forms of evidence and computer-based research tools. This article explores how such resources might be used within busi…
Finding light in dark archives
Email archives are important historical resources, but access to such data poses a unique archival challenge and many born-digital collections remain dark, while questions of how they should be effectively made available remain. This paper contributes to the growing interest in preserving access to email by addressing the needs of users, in readiness for when such collections become more widely available. We argue that for the content of email to…
Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History
British multinationals faced unprecedented challenges to their organizational legitimacy in the middle of the twentieth century as the European colonial empires were dismantled and institutional transformations changed colonial relationships in Africa and other parts of the world. This book investigates the political networking and internal organizational changes in five British multinationals (United Africa Company, John Holt & Co., Ashanti Gold…
Enron and the California Energy Crisis
We provide an analytically structured history of Enron's involvement in the California energy crisis, exploring its emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an interorganizational network to manipulate California's energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization, is often highly dependent on the support …
Expropriations of Foreign Property and Political Alliances
This paper proposes a classification of government expropriations of foreign property based on the types of alliances sought out by governments in their quest for support for those actions. Based on a review of historical literature and social science studies of expropriations in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in the twentieth century, we define three types of alliances: with organized labor, with domestic business owners, or with sections …
Rethinking history and memory in organization studies
The historic turn in organization studies has led to greater appreciation of the potential contribution from historical research. However, there is increasing emphasis on integrating history into organization studies, rather than on recognizing how accommodating history might require a reorientation. As a result, key conceptual and methodological insights from historiography have been overlooked or at times misrepresented. We identify four modes …
Less Than an Empire and More Than British
Africanization in British Multinationals in Ghana and Nigeria, 1945–1970
Multinationals experienced significant legitimacy challenges in less-developed countries between 1945 and 1970. Corporate responses to these challenges cover three distinct periods. Unsuccessful postwar attempts focusing on colonial welfare concerns were followed by pragmatic endeavors intended to repair corporate reputations by Africanizing senior management. By the 1960s, this had become a common approach to legitimization. The challenges of Af…
Special issue introduction
Both business historians and organisation studies scholars study institutional change to understand the interactions between business and society. However, research approaches differ fundamentally, with organisational research focusing on theory-driven explanations, whereas historical research is rather theory-informed. The consequence of such disciplinary orientation is that interdisciplinary conversations rarely occur. For this special issue, w…
Change of referencing style
We are now inviting manuscripts to be submitted with in-text references from 2018 onwards, as Business History will change its citation format from endnote to in-text author–date from 2019. There w
Clio in the business school
On the back of recent and significant new debates on the use of history within business and management studies, we consider the perception of historians as being anti-theory and of having methodological shortcomings; and business and management scholars displaying insufficient attention to historical context and privileging of certain social science methods over others. These are explored through an examination of three subjects: strategy, intern…
Paradigms lost
This article reviews recent attempts at mapping research paradigms in Management and Organizational History and argues that the old distinctions between supplementarist, integrationist, and reorientationist approaches have been superseded by attempts at integrating historical research in organization studies. A typology of these integrationist approaches differentiates between pluralist and unitary integration, as well as between models based on …
Organizations in Time
The title of this edited volume is slightly misleading, as its various contributions explore the potential for more historical analysis in organization studies rather than addressing issues associated with time and organizing. Hopefully this will not distract from the important achievement of this volume—important especially for business historians—in further expanding and integrating business history into management and organization studies. The…
The silence of the archives
History as a discipline has been accused of being a-theoretical. Business historians working at business schools, however, need to better explicate their historical methodology, not theory, in order to communicate the value of archival research to social scientists, and to train future doctoral students outside history departments. This paper seeks to outline an important aspect of historical methodology, which is data collection from archives. I…
Rethinking history and memory in organization studies
The historic turn in organization studies has led to greater appreciation of the potential contribution from historical research. However, there is increasing emphasis on integrating history into organization studies, rather than on recognizing how accommodating history might require a reorientation. As a result, key conceptual and methodological insights from historiography have been overlooked or at times misrepresented. We identify four modes …
New business histories! Plurality in business history research methods
We agree with de Jong et al.'s argument that business historians should make their methods more explicit and welcome a more general debate about the most appropriate methods for business historical research. But rather than advocating one ‘new business history’, we argue that contemporary debates about methodology in business history need greater appreciation for the diversity of approaches that have developed in the last decade. And while the hy…
Building Up Goodwill
Contemporary sub-Saharan Africa presents a puzzle to many observers, and has generally been perceived as a hostile environment to modern business. It is indeed difficult to make sense of politics and business on the continent without understanding how African colonies turned into independent countries since the late 1950s, and how they evolved into postcolonial states from the 1970s onwards. Imperial business was witness to these fundamental chan…
Corporate Legitimacy and Advertising
Development, modernity, and industrialization became dominant themes in corporate advertising in Africa in the 1950s and remained prevalent through the following two decades while many African nations were gaining independence. British businesses operating there created a publicity strategy that couched their presence in less developed countries in terms of a commitment and a positive contribution to the progress of the new states. Eventually, Br…
Clio in the business school
On the back of recent and significant new debates on the use of history within business and management studies, we consider the perception of historians as being anti-theory and of having methodological shortcomings; and business and management scholars displaying insufficient attention to historical context and privileging of certain social science methods over others. These are explored through an examination of three subjects: strategy, intern…
Special issue introduction
Both business historians and organisation studies scholars study institutional change to understand the interactions between business and society. However, research approaches differ fundamentally, with organisational research focusing on theory-driven explanations, whereas historical research is rather theory-informed. The consequence of such disciplinary orientation is that interdisciplinary conversations rarely occur. For this special issue, w…
Africanization in British Multinationals in Ghana and Nigeria, 1945–1970
Multinationals experienced significant legitimacy challenges in less-developed countries between 1945 and 1970. Corporate responses to these challenges cover three distinct periods. Unsuccessful postwar attempts focusing on colonial welfare concerns were followed by pragmatic endeavors intended to repair corporate reputations by Africanizing senior management. By the 1960s, this had become a common approach to legitimization. The challenges of Af…
Corporate political activity in less developed countries
The article expands existing categorisations of political and economic governance by including literature on less developed countries (LDCs). In four consecutive negotiations between the US multinational Kaisers and the US and Ghana governments in the early 1960s, it is argued that the company reached levels of influence that are at odds with existing explanations. In order to understand corporate political activities in LDCs, analysis needs to g…
Paradigms lost
This article reviews recent attempts at mapping research paradigms in Management and Organizational History and argues that the old distinctions between supplementarist, integrationist, and reorientationist approaches have been superseded by attempts at integrating historical research in organization studies. A typology of these integrationist approaches differentiates between pluralist and unitary integration, as well as between models based on …
Decolonising Barclays Bank DCO? corporate Africanisation in Nigeria, 1945–69
The reaction of British business to the decolonisation of the Empire has been the focus of much recent research, but few studies have shed light on the continued presence of commercial activities after independence. Barclays Bank DCO in Nigeria began indigenising its staff during decolonisation, but this process was far from complete at independence. African managers at Barclays were supposed to continue British banking traditions, while the post…
Expropriations of Foreign Property and Political Alliances
This paper proposes a classification of government expropriations of foreign property based on the types of alliances sought out by governments in their quest for support for those actions. Based on a review of historical literature and social science studies of expropriations in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in the twentieth century, we define three types of alliances: with organized labor, with domestic business owners, or with sections …
Using born-digital archives for business history
Historians of business and management increasingly conduct research in digital archives. This article reviews some of the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of born-digital archives. As an example, we focus on scholarly use of large-scale organizational e-mail collections. In addition to allowing researchers to answer traditional questions about innovation, strategy and organizational development, e-mail also permits more granul…
Using digital sources
As historians start researching the late twentieth century, they are increasingly finding traces of the past created digitally. At the same time, use of computers to digitise analogue material means that many pre-digital sources have been reproduced digitally. As such, future historical research will increasingly include digital forms of evidence and computer-based research tools. This article explores how such resources might be used within busi…
Enron and the California Energy Crisis
We provide an analytically structured history of Enron's involvement in the California energy crisis, exploring its emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an interorganizational network to manipulate California's energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization, is often highly dependent on the support …
Silence of the archives redux
This reflective essay revisits my 2013 article, ‘The Silence of the Archives,’ to explore its origins, reception, and continuing relevance for management and organizational history. I discuss the epistemic and methodological debates that shaped the original piece, including historiographical traditions, postcolonial theory, and the challenges of interdisciplinary engagement. The essay considers the ‘after-history’ of the article, particularly in …
A microhistory of architecture historical imagination and the Bauhaus
In this paper, we develop the notion of historical imagination as a methodological practice in microhistory. The relevance of microhistory for organization research goes beyond the focus on the small scale, as its methods involve tracing the sources that allow us to reconstruct lived experience. We use the Bauhaus School as a case study to illustrate how microhistorical methods and historical imagination can reconstruct the perception and impact …
Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History
British multinationals faced unprecedented challenges to their organizational legitimacy in the middle of the twentieth century as the European colonial empires were dismantled and institutional transformations changed colonial relationships in Africa and other parts of the world. This book investigates the political networking and internal organizational changes in five British multinationals (United Africa Company, John Holt & Co., Ashanti Gold…
Change of referencing style
We are now inviting manuscripts to be submitted with in-text references from 2018 onwards, as Business History will change its citation format from endnote to in-text author–date from 2019. There w
Exploring business history of the Middle East and North Africa region
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has witnessed modern growth. It is seen to be one of the world’s emerging business and economic regions, with much happening recently. However, the ME
The institutional development of Islamic finance in the Middle East
The Islamic finance sector has experienced rapid growth since its commercialisation in the 1970s. For many Muslim countries that gained independence from their colonial rulers, developing a financial industry that represented their faith and value belief systems gave the population a sense of identity. In our study, we traced the historical development of the Islamic finance sector in the Middle East. We applied a post-colonial perspective and th…
Taking stock and moving forward
This editorial reflects on the research published in Business History in the last few years in the context of wider discussions in the field of business history. In particular, we consider the authors and their thematic orientation, reflection on the geographic and disciplinary distribution and gender balance in the field. Articles published cluster around specific time periods, countries and regions, with early modern or medieval history, and re…
Organizations in Time
The title of this edited volume is slightly misleading, as its various contributions explore the potential for more historical analysis in organization studies rather than addressing issues associated with time and organizing. Hopefully this will not distract from the important achievement of this volume—important especially for business historians—in further expanding and integrating business history into management and organization studies. The…
Decolonising Barclays Bank DCO? corporate Africanisation in Nigeria, 1945–69
The reaction of British business to the decolonisation of the Empire has been the focus of much recent research, but few studies have shed light on the continued presence of commercial activities after independence. Barclays Bank DCO in Nigeria began indigenising its staff during decolonisation, but this process was far from complete at independence. African managers at Barclays were supposed to continue British banking traditions, while the post…
Corporate Legitimacy and Advertising
Development, modernity, and industrialization became dominant themes in corporate advertising in Africa in the 1950s and remained prevalent through the following two decades while many African nations were gaining independence. British businesses operating there created a publicity strategy that couched their presence in less developed countries in terms of a commitment and a positive contribution to the progress of the new states. Eventually, Br…
Building Up Goodwill
Contemporary sub-Saharan Africa presents a puzzle to many observers, and has generally been perceived as a hostile environment to modern business. It is indeed difficult to make sense of politics and business on the continent without understanding how African colonies turned into independent countries since the late 1950s, and how they evolved into postcolonial states from the 1970s onwards. Imperial business was witness to these fundamental chan…
Corporate political activity in less developed countries
The article expands existing categorisations of political and economic governance by including literature on less developed countries (LDCs). In four consecutive negotiations between the US multinational Kaisers and the US and Ghana governments in the early 1960s, it is argued that the company reached levels of influence that are at odds with existing explanations. In order to understand corporate political activities in LDCs, analysis needs to g…
The silence of the archives
History as a discipline has been accused of being a-theoretical. Business historians working at business schools, however, need to better explicate their historical methodology, not theory, in order to communicate the value of archival research to social scientists, and to train future doctoral students outside history departments. This paper seeks to outline an important aspect of historical methodology, which is data collection from archives. I…
Research Strategies for Organizational History
If history matters for organization theory, then we need greater reflexivity regarding the epistemological problem of representing the past; otherwise, history might be seen as merely a repository of ready-made data. To facilitate this reflexivity, we set out three epistemological dualisms derived from historical theory to explain the relationship between history and organization theory: (1) in the dualism of explanation, historians are preoccupi…
Solid intentions
Research on organizational spaces has not considered the importance of collective memory for the process of investing meaning in corporate architecture. Employing an archival ethnography approach, practices of organizational remembering emerge as a way to shape the meanings associated with architectural designs. While the role of monuments and museums are well established in studies of collective memory, this research extends the concept of spati…
New business histories! Plurality in business history research methods
We agree with de Jong et al.'s argument that business historians should make their methods more explicit and welcome a more general debate about the most appropriate methods for business historical research. But rather than advocating one ‘new business history’, we argue that contemporary debates about methodology in business history need greater appreciation for the diversity of approaches that have developed in the last decade. And while the hy…
Paradigms lost
This article reviews recent attempts at mapping research paradigms in Management and Organizational History and argues that the old distinctions between supplementarist, integrationist, and reorientationist approaches have been superseded by attempts at integrating historical research in organization studies. A typology of these integrationist approaches differentiates between pluralist and unitary integration, as well as between models based on …
Organizations in Time
The title of this edited volume is slightly misleading, as its various contributions explore the potential for more historical analysis in organization studies rather than addressing issues associated with time and organizing. Hopefully this will not distract from the important achievement of this volume—important especially for business historians—in further expanding and integrating business history into management and organization studies. The…
Clio in the business school
On the back of recent and significant new debates on the use of history within business and management studies, we consider the perception of historians as being anti-theory and of having methodological shortcomings; and business and management scholars displaying insufficient attention to historical context and privileging of certain social science methods over others. These are explored through an examination of three subjects: strategy, intern…
Less Than an Empire and More Than British
Africanization in British Multinationals in Ghana and Nigeria, 1945–1970
Multinationals experienced significant legitimacy challenges in less-developed countries between 1945 and 1970. Corporate responses to these challenges cover three distinct periods. Unsuccessful postwar attempts focusing on colonial welfare concerns were followed by pragmatic endeavors intended to repair corporate reputations by Africanizing senior management. By the 1960s, this had become a common approach to legitimization. The challenges of Af…
Special issue introduction
Both business historians and organisation studies scholars study institutional change to understand the interactions between business and society. However, research approaches differ fundamentally, with organisational research focusing on theory-driven explanations, whereas historical research is rather theory-informed. The consequence of such disciplinary orientation is that interdisciplinary conversations rarely occur. For this special issue, w…
Change of referencing style
We are now inviting manuscripts to be submitted with in-text references from 2018 onwards, as Business History will change its citation format from endnote to in-text author–date from 2019. There w
Expropriations of Foreign Property and Political Alliances
This paper proposes a classification of government expropriations of foreign property based on the types of alliances sought out by governments in their quest for support for those actions. Based on a review of historical literature and social science studies of expropriations in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in the twentieth century, we define three types of alliances: with organized labor, with domestic business owners, or with sections …
Rethinking history and memory in organization studies
The historic turn in organization studies has led to greater appreciation of the potential contribution from historical research. However, there is increasing emphasis on integrating history into organization studies, rather than on recognizing how accommodating history might require a reorientation. As a result, key conceptual and methodological insights from historiography have been overlooked or at times misrepresented. We identify four modes …
Enron and the California Energy Crisis
We provide an analytically structured history of Enron's involvement in the California energy crisis, exploring its emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an interorganizational network to manipulate California's energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization, is often highly dependent on the support …
Finding light in dark archives
Email archives are important historical resources, but access to such data poses a unique archival challenge and many born-digital collections remain dark, while questions of how they should be effectively made available remain. This paper contributes to the growing interest in preserving access to email by addressing the needs of users, in readiness for when such collections become more widely available. We argue that for the content of email to…
Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History
British multinationals faced unprecedented challenges to their organizational legitimacy in the middle of the twentieth century as the European colonial empires were dismantled and institutional transformations changed colonial relationships in Africa and other parts of the world. This book investigates the political networking and internal organizational changes in five British multinationals (United Africa Company, John Holt & Co., Ashanti Gold…
Human resource management in the age of generative artificial intelligence
ChatGPT and its variants that use generative artificial intelligence (AI) models have rapidly become a focal point in academic and media discussions about their potential benefits and drawbacks across various sectors of the economy, democracy, society, and environment. It remains unclear whether these technologies result in job displacement or creation, or if they merely shift human labour by generating new, potentially trivial or practically irr…
Using born-digital archives for business history
Historians of business and management increasingly conduct research in digital archives. This article reviews some of the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of born-digital archives. As an example, we focus on scholarly use of large-scale organizational e-mail collections. In addition to allowing researchers to answer traditional questions about innovation, strategy and organizational development, e-mail also permits more granul…
Using digital sources
As historians start researching the late twentieth century, they are increasingly finding traces of the past created digitally. At the same time, use of computers to digitise analogue material means that many pre-digital sources have been reproduced digitally. As such, future historical research will increasingly include digital forms of evidence and computer-based research tools. This article explores how such resources might be used within busi…
A microhistory of architecture historical imagination and the Bauhaus
In this paper, we develop the notion of historical imagination as a methodological practice in microhistory. The relevance of microhistory for organization research goes beyond the focus on the small scale, as its methods involve tracing the sources that allow us to reconstruct lived experience. We use the Bauhaus School as a case study to illustrate how microhistorical methods and historical imagination can reconstruct the perception and impact …
Taking stock and moving forward
This editorial reflects on the research published in Business History in the last few years in the context of wider discussions in the field of business history. In particular, we consider the authors and their thematic orientation, reflection on the geographic and disciplinary distribution and gender balance in the field. Articles published cluster around specific time periods, countries and regions, with early modern or medieval history, and re…
Political science (18 obras) · Economics (15 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Business history (13 obras) · Management and Organizational Studies (13 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Business (8 obras) · Comparative historical research (8 obras) · Computer Science (8 obras)