In order for historians to understand organizational and elite behavior, an archive is of the essence. In an oral world, however, new ways must be found to create archives. Oral history can greatly contribute to finding those new ways. Moreover, oral history can provide sources in a more timely fashion than conventional archives are able to provide them. It can take up to a century before government archives are opened. Consequently, oral history often offers the only sources available. Oral history projects on American presidents, for example, are important historical sources since “the White House operates largely as an oral culture. Although written decision memos are the norm, much of the most important business there occurs only in spoken, not written, words.” After the Nixon Watergate tapes, the threat of an impeachment procedure against President Ronald Reagan after E-mail messages from the White House in the Iran-Contra affair had become public, and the Kenneth Starr report on President Bill Clinton, the White House “has increasingly become a place resistant to keeping written records.”16
The same could be said for business. C. J. van der Klugt, President of Philips from 1986 to 1990, never used memos to manage his personnel. Instead, he engaged in small bilateral corridor talks with his management and staff. Although this was very typical for his management style, it would have gone unnoticed if one relied only on written documents. What's more, company archives are at best fragmentarily kept, often off-limits for outsiders (including researchers), offer only limited accessibility and are rarely well-catalogued.17 This does not phase oral historians, however, as archiving unwritten stories that were never recorded or that are as yet unavailable lies at the very heart of the discipline.18
Without a good oral history archive, it is difficult to understand and reconstruct why certain decisions were made in the past. This was one of the reasons for the aforementioned Dutch municipality to ask us to reconstruct the development and implementation of its management vision. The same was true for the Centurion program at Philips: the team of top managers and staff that coordinated and developed Centurion operated secretly and did not commit to paper their decisions or plans. As interviewees declared, “there was no master plan,” it “was not made in an office,” and it was not a “cut-and-dried” operation. Along the way, Philips managers came up with solutions in the course of talks or stumbled upon a solution on the shop floor, which was then passed along to a colleague. One can only understand this process through candid, detailed interviews with the people involved.

A scientific advancement: bridging the gap with business history

Historical research on (business) organizations and leadership is still viewed by many academic historians as not rigorous: seemingly not surpassing the level of a glossy hagiography on the occasion of a firm’s anniversary or the retirement of a CEO. The lack of historical consciousness, a discourse full of managerial and commercial jargon and the slick style of such corporate histories and elite biographies, form a fertile breeding ground for misinterpretation.19 Many (oral) historians do not regard business history as proper history. The task of bridging the gap between both fields can be compared to what Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack experienced when they began their research on women’s history. For them, one of the main problems was the “incomplete conversion from traditional to feminist historical paradigms.”20 When historians “learn to listen,” the managerial jargon and the slick style become much less of an obstacle. Moreover, it will become clear that the lack of historical consciousness of the oral histories provided by business historians is a relative notion.
Many private elite accounts are left unused because of misinterpretation. A historical account of the life of a business leader, such as a biography, is not seen as “real” history because it presumably lacks depth and scientific relevance.21 A leading organizational scientist has argued that “The books are composed largely of rather idiosyncratic, personal reflections and post hoc justifications for decisions, failures and personal outbursts. They had little to tell us about the processes and problems of managing. What they offer us are little more than banalities and truisms.”22 At the same time, (oral) historians do not pay a great deal of attention to the life stories of business leaders. A large oral history project on British North Sea Oil, for example, places the classic emphasis on the workers (“the Scottish coolies”), stating that the story of the executive is “often enough told.”23 Both the organizational scientists and these historians seem to overlook that the creation of a leader’s life story is a scientific process of oral history as well.24
Many elite and organizational histories are written by business historians. The discipline of business history is often seen as quite different from oral history. At the same time, however, it has been argued that business history was the first discipline to adopt oral history as a scientific method. As such, it was the study of business that lent authority and credibility to oral history as an academic tool for historical enquiry.25 Currently, oral history is scarcely used in the field of business history. It has lost its innovative function. As a result, theoretical and methodological innovations produced by oral history are missed in business history.26 This is one of the reasons that business history has lost its connection with other fields of history and is now often seen by them as “not real” scholarship.
In comparison to cultural or political history, oral history plays a marginal scientific role as well, albeit to a lesser extent than could be said of business history. This is regrettable and yet another incentive to stimulate cooperation between the two fields. After all, oral history and business history share many of the same challenges. Just like oral history in the 1970s and 1980s,27 business history is currently facing constant challenges regarding its historical merits in the use and selection of sources and modes of explanation. Similar challenges against oral history have led to an impressive list of publications. Alessandro Portelli, perhaps the foremost advocate of oral history, has very clearly demonstrated that oral history is scientifically sound.28 Debates justifying oral history have provided the discipline with a strong methodology and theory.29 Similarly, business history could gain both theoretically and methodologically from the outcomes of such debates. Oral history, on the other hand, could benefit from the abundant amount of material provided and collected by business historians. Many interesting oral history projects are set up by business historians, and there are national archives full of oral historical accounts. In the British Library, for example, oral archives pertaining to British Steel, UK oil and gas companies, the Post Office, and Tesco’s and Barings Bank are waiting for in-depth oral historical research.30

16 Russell L. Riley, “Presidential Oral History: The Clinton Presidential History Project,” Oral History Review 34, no. 2 (2007): 86–89.
17 Carl Ryant, “Oral History and Business History,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (1988): 562.
18 For example, Nancy MacKay, Curating Oral Histories: From Interview to Archive (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007).
19 Sjoerd Keulen and Ronald Kroeze, “Understanding Management Gurus and Historical Narratives: The Benefits of a Historic Turn in Management and Organization Studies,” Organizational History and Management 7, no. 2 (2012).
20 Anderson and Jack, “Learning to Listen,” 15.
21 Ben Gales and Pim Kooij, “De Nederlandse ondernemersbiografie in het perspectief van tijd en theorie,” in De ondernemersbiografie, ed. Jacques van Gerwen, Marcel Metze and Hans Renders (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Boom, 2008).
22 David Collins, Organizational Change: Sociological Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2004), 39.
23 Terry Brotherstone and Hugo Manson, “North Sea Oil, Its Narratives and Its History: An Archive of Oral Documentation and the Making of Contemporary Britain,” Northern Scotland 27 (2007): 26, 34, 36–37.
24 Alexander von Plato, “Zeitzeugen und die historische Zunft: Erinnerung, kommunikative Tradierung und kollektives Gedächtnis in der qualitativen Geschichtswissenschaft—ein Problemaufriss,” Bios 13, no. 1 (2000): 26–27.
25 Patrick Fridenson, “Business History and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Business History, ed. Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin, 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Anthony Seldon and Joanna Rappoworth, By Word of Mouth: ‘Élite’ Oral History (London: Methuen, 1983), 153–58.
26 Note the unreflective use of historiography and linear use of methodology in Marilynn Collins and Robert Bloom, “The Role of Oral History in Accounting,” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 4, no. 4 (1991): 23–31; Theresa Hammond and Prem Sikka, “Radicalizing Accounting History: The Potential of Oral History,” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 9, no. 3 (1996): 79–97; Michelle Emery, Jill Hooks, and Ross Stewart, “Born at the Wrong Time? An Oral History of Women Professional Accountants in New Zealand,” Accounting History 7, no. 2 (2002): 7–34.
27 See for example the reprint of the 1975 article: Ronald Gele, “Movement without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History,” in Perks and Thompson, eds., The Oral History Reader.
28 Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 45–59.
29 For example, see Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Marta Kurkowska-Budzan and Krzystof Zamorski, eds., Oral History: The Challenges of Dialogue (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009).
30 After five years of extensive interviews, an archive was created for North Sea Oil, but the historical analysis has yet to be done: Brotherstone and Manson, “North Sea Oil,” 39–41. For an overview of the companies, see the British Library National life Stories Web site: http://www.bl.uk/nls.

To be continued...

Sjoerd Keulen and Ronald Kroeze
Correspondence to be sent to: E-mail: S.J.Keulen@uva.nl and dbr.kroeze@let.vu.nl

sourse: Oral History Review, Volume 39, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2012, pp. 15-36



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