The article describes what we have come to call ANTi-History, which entails the development of actor-network theory (ANT) as a critical approach to organizational historiography. It proceeds through four sections: 1) a review of the call for critical organizational historiography to establish the need for ANTi-History; 2) an overview of ANT to identify its potential to contribute to critical organizational historiography; 3) a development of ANT insights into an ANTi-History, through engagement with cultural theory historiography, and the sociology of knowledge; and 4) an account of the potential contribution of ANTi-History to critical management studies.

Historical research now has a relatively high profile in organization studies, and organization theories are better represented in business history, thanks to increased interdisciplinary dialogue over the last decade. It might therefore be that the ‘historic turn’ has materialized in organization studies, and that business history has become significantly more conceptual in nature. We argue, however, that in terms of the original definition of the historic turn, as a rejection of scientism, acceptance of more heterogeneous forms of history, and reflexive accounts of the social construction of historicized narratives, there has been little progress. We revisit the idea of the turn in depth here, to examine the ways of doing history that might encourage a more substantial turn towards theory and towards history as a means of developing it. In particular, we suggest that an approach we term ‘critical organizational history’ remains underdeveloped, as a theoretically informed historicized approach to understanding how and why we come to be where we are in contemporary organized societies. Our aim is to take stock of the historic turn’s progress, reminding critically oriented organizational scholars and practitioners of organizational history of the importance of completing the turn with the underlying purpose of critique. To do this, we surface seven aspects of practice and three implications of them that demonstrate the underside of theorizing historically that we suggest are central to critical analysis. Understood and practised collectively, these could provoke considerable more critical organizational history to the benefit of all.

The strength of historical accounts of organizations has been their ability to present the development of a particular company or companies in an apparently seamless, linear and concrete fashion (Rowlinson 2004). Recent academic literature on the subject has approached popular and conventional manners of writing company histories with much skepticism, questioning the particular nature and privileged status of knowledge produced in such accounts. Specifically, it has been suggested that understanding the intent of central historical actors, as well as grounding cultural accounts of company histories in the circumstances of their production can aid in a more holistic and in some cases plural (Boje 1995) understanding of the content of the history (Gillespie 1991; Rowlinson 2004).This paper begins with a review of the current literature on company histories in which two commonly discussed perspectives are outlined and discussed. We first argue that missing from the current perspectives of crafting company histories is an understanding of how the socio-political context in which the company history is crafted comes to influence the actual story told or knowledge produced about the company history. Second, it is suggested that a use of Actor-Network Theory or ANT (Latour 1987) may provide some useful insights as to the socio-political process of writing company histories and the influence of these processes on the nature of knowledge produced. Due to the emphasis on performativity in ANT (Law 1992), the third section of this paper extends the first two sections empirically by drawing on materials from the Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) archive at the University of Miami's Otto Richter Library.1 Through a presentation of the political process of writing a company history of Pan Am, ANT is used to show how the actors involved in crafting the company history negotiate and craft what is now a privileged and taken for granted`factual' company history. Finally, it is proposed that the strength of our approach lies in a recasting of company histories as created and crafted through the negotiated `ordering' (Law 1994) of story-tellers.

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Purpose This paper develops and provides insights on how researchers can use ANTi-History with a focus on one of its constitutive facets, relationalism. The purpose of this paper is to, first, develop a central facet of ANTi-History called relationalism and to outline how researchers interested in doing organizational history can use ANTi-History insights to undertake relational histories. Design/methodology/approach The authors propose four phases of the historic turn literature and situate ANTi-History and relationalism as an outcome of the fourth phase. The facet of relationalism is then explained and explored through five types of relations that the authors suggest act as sites of oscillation, where the past becomes (an immutable) history. Findings A central implication of the paper involves disrupting conceptualizations of the past and history as fixed. Instead, history is explained as a relational outcome of its constitutive social and political relationships. Originality/value The paper theoretically develops ANTi-History and relationalism while providing practical implications and tools for researchers to use it. Researchers are introduced to the notion of the site of oscillation. They are encouraged to focus their attention on five sites of oscillation: past-history, actor-network, human-nonhuman, researcher-traces of the past, and historical inscription-reading formation. These sites of oscillation are places where politics is at play and history is shaped or transformed.