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Governing the factory: microhistories of the present

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ewan MackenzieORCiD, Professor Alan McKinlay, Professor Stephen Procter

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Abstract

Microhistory is an established form of cultural history but marginal to management and organization history. Methodologically, microhistory searches out moments and practices that are meaningful to participants but deeply strange to us. Such peculiar moments are subjected to intense scrutiny to understand how they were meaningful to participants. Understanding the extraordinary becomes the portal to the cultural commonplace. Michel Foucault’s genealogies of modern disciplinary power deployed microhistorical methods to render their meaning and their strangeness visible. Microhistory’s innovative method often remains implicit in narratives. This paper demonstrates the analytical value of microhistory to management and history by considering two events separated by four decades in an aerospace factory. In the first event, the factory halted production to celebrate New Year’s Eve in 1953. In this world turned upside down the factory was under the temporary authority of the workers. The second event, some forty years later, involved the dismissal of a shop steward for flouting managerial authority and his refusal to identify as an enterprising individual responsible for his work cell’s competitiveness. Management history and organization theory can be enriched by deploying microhistory’s techniques of intense interrogation of moments that confound our assumptions. Microhistory’s ascending analysis dislodges any temptation to read organizational practices and cultures from the boardroom down.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Gibbs E, Mackenzie E, McKinlay A, McNulty D, Phillips J, Procter S

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Management and Organizational History

Year: 2024

Pages: epub ahead of print

Online publication date: 03/10/2024

Acceptance date: 23/09/2024

Date deposited: 07/10/2024

ISSN (print): 1744-9359

ISSN (electronic): 1744-9367

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2024.2409127

DOI: 10.1080/17449359.2024.2409127


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