Jean Helms Mills

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Saint Mary's University

Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze current literature on critical sensemaking (CSM) to assess its significance and potential for understanding the role of agency in management and organizational studies. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis involves an examination of a selection of 51 applied studies that cite, draw on...

Critical Sensemaking (CSM) is a method of analysis that stems from a combination of scientific philosophies and methodologies, including postmodernism, interpretism and critical theory. For critical scholars interested in understanding agency in innovation, the CSM method aids in theorising power as a multifaceted phenomenon with both productive an...

Purpose This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetoric...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to revisit the potential of the New Deal as a research context in management and organization studies and, in doing so, forward the role one of its chief architects, Harry Hopkins, played in managing the economic crisis. The exploration takes us to multiple layers that work together to form context around Hopkin...

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é contribuir para uma grande variedade de perspectivas teóricas e configurações empíricas para gerar evidências cumulativas sobre a influência de legados históricos e capacidade organizacional para gerenciar o passado. Continuando com a perspectiva crítica que desafia o domínio das epistemologias anglo-saxônicas nos e...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of where the course of the collective efforts in historical research on business and organizations has taken this discipline. By raising two key contributions that have sought to reshape the contours of management and organizational history, the authors trace the work of their field since...

Purpose This study aims to examine the textual performance of the Ocean Ranger Disaster inquiry, thus responding to recent calls to “practice context” in historical writing. This study goes beyond the epistemological assumptions about the grounds for knowing about the past as the authors explore how history is produced in the context of power relat...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to draw attention to the heuristic value of intersectionality by historicizing it as a framework appropriate for the use of studying discrimination and discriminatory practices in organizations over time. Design/methodology/approach Utilizing a fusion between amodernist historiography vis-à-vis the nascent ANTi...

Purpose This paper aims to study the role of non-corporeal Actant theory in historical research through a case study of the trajectory of the New Deal as one of the foremost institutions in the USA since its inception in the early 1930s. Design/methodology/approach The authors follow the trajectory of the New Deal through a focus on Vice President...

Purpose The authors focus on “writing women into ‘history’” in this study, embracing the notion of cisgender and ethnicity in relation to the “historic turn”. As such, the authors bring forward the stories of the US Pan American Airway’s Guided Missile Range Division (GMRD) and the White women who worked there. The authors ask what has a Cold War U...

Purpose This paper aims to outline the possibilities of intersectional history as a novel method for management history. Intersectional history combines intersectionality and the study of the past to examine discrimination in organizations over time. This paper explores the need for intersectional work in management history, outlines the vision for...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce decolonial feminist theorizing to the field of organizational history to explore issues of historical revisionism, hierarchy, power, and coloniality. This paper is a theoretical work and uses empirical material from the archive of the company Pan American Airways (PAA) to exemplify possible interpretations...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze current literature on critical sensemaking (CSM) to assess its significance and potential for understanding the role of agency in management and organizational studies. Design/methodology/approach The analysis involves an examination of a selection of 51 applied studies that cite, draw on and contr...

This paper focuses on the impact of warfare, gender, and memory on the development of Imperial Airways (British Airways’ predecessor airline). Through a ‘close reading’ of archival materials and published histories, we examine how wartime experience prior, during, and following World War I came to shape the development of gendered organizational pr...

This paper centers on the role of narratives in business history from an ANTi-History perspective. We focus on the networked processes through which narratives are told of, for, and by multi-national companies embed the development of ‘new imperialism’ and coloniality. We set out to achieve this through a discussion and application of ANTi-History...

This paper examines how Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) - an early incarnation of a multinational enterprise (MNE) - developed its image as an international company. In particular, we examine how the company developed and managed potentially conflicting narratives, including the modernising US company and the airline of 'the Americas' (specific...

Questions related to ageing are shared widely in and between organizations. People are living longer and working longer than they used to earlier (Levinson 1978). The percentage of people over 60 years of age is growing rapidly worldwide, with one report estimating that by mid-century the number of people over 60 will triple to nearly two billion p...

This book explores critical perspectives on ageing in organisations and offers both managerial and workplace practices for dealing with this prominent issue. The collection provides cross-disciplinary research on the discursive and mythological aspects of ageing at work as well as recent studies of the relationship between age and innovation, talen...

This teaching case explores the problematic nature of contemporary organizations by provoking discussion on the ‘dark side’ issues of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Topics of particular importance are those pertaining to discrimination, sexual harassment, ethics, gender, age, leadership, and culture, as well as the deep structures of...

This article explores the relationship between Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) and Latin America to understand the role of Western multinational corporations in the historical processes of postcoloniality—that is, the representation of the non-Western “other” to Western audiences. Informed by postcoloniality and the use of a critical hermeneuti...

This chapter presents a feminist poststructuralist account of the role of men and masculinity in the development of Air Canada, specifically in its early years and the development of the organization’s culture. It is argued that an understanding of the development of gendered practices (i.e., the development of male associated or dominated work) ov...

In press

Guest Speakers: “Insights and Research on the study of Gender and Intersectionality in International Airline Cultures Over Time,” Institute for Gender and Diversity in Organizations, Vienna University, March.

Purpose Drawing on a series of RAND interviews with Vietnamese prisoners during the Vietnam War, the paper aims to analyze the role of colonizer–colonized in the production of postcolonial representations (postcoloniality) and the role of the Western corporation in the processes of postcoloniality. Design/methodology/approach Selected RAND inter...

This article develops an ethnographic account of the development and history of the British Airways Heritage Centre (BAHC). Responding to several observations throughout the literature, we report on our experiences of engagement with British Airways’ archives over a 25-year period. In doing so our focus is on the much-neglected history of archives...

The term intersectionality made its entrance in the research community at the end of the twentieth century. Since that time, many different approaches to intersectionality have arisen that vary in discipline, methodology, epistemology, and in conceptualization. Unfortunately though, little research has examined how to study or to apply intersection...

In this paper, we challenge the apolitical nature of technology transfer theory with ideas from science and technology studies. Using actor-network theory, we explore archival records for 3 public research organizations in Halifax, Canada. We argue that technology transfer, from government laboratories to private manufacturers, establishes ‘boundar...

Introducción El motivo de esta investigación está vinculada a la experiencia de uno de sus autores, Mariana, quién participó en la iniciativa de 2009 entre Argentina y el Banco Mundial llamada el Modelo de Equidad de Género para Argentina (MEGA), la cual se puso en práctica para promover la igualdad de género en el sector privado. Como capacitadora...

In this study we take a critical sensemaking approach to investigate organizational narratives of change at a Canadian community college to show how individuals make sense of the change process. In particular, we draw upon the property of plausibility to show how the president and CEO of the college legitimized the change narratives by drawing on r...

In this paper, drawing on ANTi-History (Durepos and Mills 2012), we set out to recover the New Deal and some of its leading figures for the field of management and organizational studies. In so doing we do not simply seek to add New Deal studies to existing histories of MOS but rather our aim is to show how MOS histories have served to narrowly def...

In 2009, Ace Taxi co-op, a taxi co-operative in the Midwestern US was facing problems with conflict and discipline. Disciplinary issues were beginning to take up too much of management and the board’s time; members were not satisfied and were suspicious of the discipline decisions being made; and the way decisions were being made was not in line wi...

Textbooks are an important element in teaching management in higher education because of their assumed ability to disseminate key theories and debates in a seemingly objective fashion. However, a number of studies have questioned not only the scientific character of the textbook but also of management theory itself. More recent studies suggest that...

This paper contributes to critical organizational historiography and the development of ANTi-History through analysis of the history of a major event in the development of Air Canada. We contend that an important gap in ANTi-History is the explanation of the point where decisions occur (i.e. understandings of the micro-processes involved in enrollm...

This paper contributes to critical organizational historiography and the development of ANTi-History through analysis of the history of a major event in the development of Air Canada. We contend that an important gap in ANTi-History is the explanation of the point where decisions occur (i.e. understandings of the micro-processes involved in enrollm...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the critical management literature through a fusion of Latin and North American lenses (one author is from Argentina and one from Canada), to question the extant women in management literature, which is rooted in an epistemology that serves to construct the notion of a broad, universal set of...

In this article we draw on an ANTi-History perspective to explore the role of ‘history-making’ in the creation of the Academy of Management (AoM). Our interests here are threefold. First, as critical management scholars we have a fundamental interest in the influence and power of knowledge over people's lives. Second, and what we see as a related a...

Reflections on the 20th anniversary of Organization provide an opportunity for considerations of the role of the past and history in critical studies of management. Yet, why should we care? Arguably, the pages of Organization are replete with analyses that take into account the past and history. Indeed they are. However, as has been contended elsew...