Stephanie Decker- PhD, MA, PG Cert
- Professor of Strategy at University of Birmingham
Stephanie Decker
- PhD, MA, PG Cert
- Professor of Strategy at University of Birmingham
FAcSS, FBAM, Co-Vice Chair Research & Publications BAM
About
91
Publications
116,036
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Introduction
I am a professor of Strategy at Birmingham Business School, UK. My work lies at the intersection of organization studies and historical research, focusing on using historical methodologies for researching organizations. I am serving my second term as co-vice-chair for Research & Publications at the British Academy of Management and just completed eleven years as co-editor at Business History—the last five years as joint editor-in-chief.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2014 - December 2019
January 2020 - December 2023
January 2020 - August 2022
Position
- Professor of History & Strategy
Description
- Head of Academic Group for Strategy, International Management & Business, and Entrepreneurship (SIMBE)
Publications
Publications (91)
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 readine...
Historical research represents an alternative understanding of temporality that can contribute to greater methodological and theoretical plurality in international business (IB) research. Historians focus on the importance of events within their historical context and structure their accounts through periodisation, assume that the temporal distance...
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 ac...
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 crea...
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...
In African countries such as Ghana, microentrepreneurs make formal economy goods and services available to base of the pyramid (BOP) consumers. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) co-opt BOP business models when they enter the BOP market. We conducted a case study of six MNEs and 36 microentrepreneurs in three key sectors. In two sectors (fast-moving...
This is the video abstract for: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2022.101380
This 13th OAP workshop jointly organized by ESADE, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL and ESSEC will be an opportunity to come back to the issue of history, historicity and historical process in Management and Organization Studies (MOS). We expect papers likely to explore historical processes and historical events from (new) metaphysical perspectives, i...
The track 'Historical Research in Management Studies' addresses the historical development of management and related areas (e.g., entrepreneurship, international business, marketing, retailing, strategy, accounting, auditing, management tools, etc.), concepts, theories, and practices as well as the application and evolution of historical research m...
This paper studies the technical, economic, and environmental feasibility of a standalone adsorption cooling system thermally driven by biomass combustion and solar thermal energy. The developed cooling package was benchmarked against a baseline vapour compression refrigeration system, driven by grid electricity and the widely investigated adsorpti...
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, ev...
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 a...
Archival ethnography describes a methodology of historical research based on archives – public, private, organizational – that considers the archive as a site for fieldwork. This entails an ethnographic sensibility that focuses on observation of quotidian details as well as a focus on practices and what is not immediately obvious. Some, but by no m...
Video abstract: https://youtu.be/v9B9wCPP6z8
Research Summary:
We consider what configurations of historical and geographic dimensions influence entrepreneurial growth aspirations (EGA). Our theoretical framework combines geography (coastal location, resource dependence), long-term colonial history (ethnic heterogeneity, legal origins), and post...
This chapter examines how time and temporality have been analyzed in social and organizational theory. Specifically, it discusses forms of analysis developed prior to the purported synthesizing of conceptual dualities under the “postmodern turn” (Nowotny, 1994; Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). The chapter reviews some of the main concepts and theories...
This is a video abstract for 2020 SEJ article:
https://youtu.be/v9B9wCPP6z8
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 i...
Data in Stata format to generate the results in Decker, Estrin, Mickiewicz (2020)
(Use together with DO file)
Do file to generate the results in Decker, Estrin, Mickiewicz (2020)
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 def...
Conceptualising BoP approach as performative enhances our knowledge of how BoP concept influences MNCs to focus on the BoP market in developing countries. We argue that Prahalad’s and co-authors notion of the fortune at the BoP knowingly change MNCs managers thinking about business opportunities in Ghana. In this study, the authors aim to explore h...
The post-war British Empire has been described as ‘more than British and less than an imperium’. Once decolonisation began, it was ‘nationalized and internationalized as part of the Anglo-American coalition’. This process continued after independence in Ghana and Nigeria, which experienced economic booms that attracted different international inves...
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...
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 disc...
Abstract
We analyse how the patterns of strategic entrepreneurship in Africa are influenced by historically-embedded institutions. We argue that history becomes embedded in institutional environments and significantly influences a key element of strategic entrepreneurship, namely entrepreneurial ambitions. Our work is both qualitiative and quantita...
British Academy Soiree poster 20 June 2017
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 scienc...
Freely available on publisher's website: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00076791.2017.1254935
Historical research in organization and management studies continues to be described as a type of inductive theory building from cases. But historical epistemology and methodological practices are better understood as a form of situated scholarly inquiry in which the researcher interprets or analyzes the past from a position in the present through...
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 appr...
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...
Freely available from publishers until June 2015: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fbsh20/57/1 .
We agree with de Jong et al.’s (2015) 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 busi...
For a full-text postprint version of this article please go to Aston's institutional repository: http://publications.aston.ac.uk/23086/
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 da...
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 muse...
Freely available here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00076791.2014.887809#.VCVDIPldWSo
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...
HausmanWilliam J., HertnerPeter, and WilkinsMira. Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xxiv + 487 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-88035-0, $80 (hardcover). - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Stephanie Decker
This paper analyses the use companies make of symbolic architectural styles to communicate changes in their corporate identity on the basis of archival documents. This research makes a methodological contribution by developing a framework to study corporate architecture that supports multiple ways in which architectural meanings are translated. Emp...
This is a detailed and comprehensive study of the international history of the electric utilities around the world and the corporate and financial institutions that made the rapid expansion of electricity from the late nineteenth century onward possible. Its scope is impressive, both in time and geography, with its coverage of over one hundred year...
***This is working paper version of "The Silence of the Archives" MOH 2013 - please cite the published version!***
History as a discipline has been accused of being a-theoretical. For business historians working at business schools, however, the issue of methodology looms larger, as it is hard to make contributions to social science debates withou...
ABSTRACT: 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...
Depression to Decolonization: Barclays Bank (DCO) in the West Indies, 1926–1962. By MonteithKathleen E. A.. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2008. xvi + 355 pp. Illustrations, tables, figures, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. Paper, $30.00. ISBN: 879-976-640-198-6. - Volume 84 Issue 4 - Stephanie Decker
This article traces the historical genesis of corruption in two West African countries: Ghana and Nigeria. It argues that corruption in Africa is an institution that emerged in direct response to colonial systems of rule which super-imposed an imported institutional system with different norms and values on an existing institutional landscape, desp...
Global Brands: The Evolution of Multinationals in Alcoholic Beverages. By LopesTeresa da Silva. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xxii + 303 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $50.00. ISBN: 978-0-521-83397-4. - Volume 83 Issue 1 - Stephanie Decker
ABSTRACT Black Economic Empowerment is a highly debated issue in contemporary South Africa. Yet few South Africans realize that they are following a postcolonial trajectory already experienced by other countries. This paper presents a case study of British firms during decolonization in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, which saw a parallel...
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...
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 howtheyevolvedintopos...
This is a study of the economic history of Lagos, a subject that has not received sufficient attention since Anthony Hopkins wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the topic in 1964. The strength of Ayodeji Olukoju’s contribution lies in the meticulous archival research into the minutiae of colonial policymaking in a highly dependent economy. Yet there are a nu...
Dekolonisation der Wirtschaft
Toyin Falola's second book on Nigeria's economic history during decolonization and the first years after independence is in many ways a companion volume to his earlier Development Planning and Decolonization in Nigeria (University Press of Florida, 1996). The difference between the two books, according to the author, is that the present study is "g...
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...
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 independenc...
After the end of the Second World War Britain found itself economically more dependent on its empire than ever before. In the face of the nationalist challenge, modernizing the colonies developed from an economic necessity of the metropolis into the new imperial self-justification of continued rule. Mobilizing labour was an integral part of the new...
Questions
Question (1)
Business history used to be considered a sub-specialization of economic history. In the last few decades, many economic history departments have been closed down, and business historians have moved out of history departments and into business schools in many countries (esp. in the UK). This has given rise to a debate about the future direction of business history, with some arguing for a move towards more economics-based methodology (Daniel Raff in the US, Abe de Jong and David Higgins in Europe), while the US in particular has seen the rise of the "History of Capitalism" approach that seeks to return the history of business in society to history departments. Finally Management & Organizational History seeks to leverage the heritage of qualitative historical methodology for organization studies, as well as applying the insights of organization theory to historical research. These competing approaches potentially have a profound impact on the direction of historical research on business in the future.
