Historical Research in Management: a Proposal for Research Practices

Abstract

Since the last decade, the use of History has been consolidating as a legitimate perspective in research in the field of Administration in general and in Organizational Studies in a more specific way. However, in spite of the maturation, this type of research still needs to be explained more about concepts and procedures that allow the operationalization of Historical research within the field of Administration. In this sense, this article aims to discuss the paths of Historical Research in Administration as a research method, aiming to elucidate the concept of historical research and historical method. In order to reach this goal, we seek to revisit the historical research in administration and then discuss three main guiding concepts of historical research: historical fact, sources and historical documents and historical operation, inserted within a path and methodological operationalization considering the different stages of historical research and its particularities. With this discussion, we intend to open the way for researchers in the area of administration to assume a critical and reflexive action capable of breaking with traditional thinking that perceives organizations as static structures, regular and constituted from causal relationships whose universal laws and standards seek to explain and predict, historically, what happens in the social world.