Purpose This paper aims to show how historical approaches can better inform understanding of hospitality and tourism research. Recent work in business and management has posited the value of historical research and narrative frameworks to explicate business phenomena – here the authors propose an approach to hospitality and tourism studies could be similarly beneficial. Design/methodology/approach Three principal historical approaches are proposed: systematic study of historical archives, oral histories and biography and prosopography. The paper further proposes that such work should be aligned to Andrews and Burke’s framework of the 5Cs: context, change over time, causality, complexity and contingency to help situate research appropriately and effectively. Findings This paper suggests that historical methods can prove particularly useful in hospitality and tourism research by testing, extending and creating theory that is empirically informed and socially situated. The analysis put forward shows that undertaking historical work set against the framework of the 5Cs of historical research offers the potential for wider and deeper understandings of hospitality and tourism research by revealing temporal and historical dynamics in the field that may hitherto be unseen or insufficiently explored. Originality/value Much of the existing work on the benefits of historical approaches in business and management has focussed on the why or the what. This paper focuses on the how, articulating how historical approaches offer significant potential to aid the understanding of hospitality and tourism research.

This article examines William Baumol's theory about the interaction between taxation and entrepreneurship and proposes an extension to it. The analysis shows that the traditional form of Baumol's model, focusing mainly on the level of taxes, cannot be used in order to explain what happened in the Greek case. Utilising historical evidence from the mid-1950s to the late-1980s, this paper confirms that problematic tax rules create difficulties for entrepreneurship and can lead to unproductive forms of it, as Baumol suggests. However, the focus here is on aspects of the system of taxation that Baumol's model, examining solely tax rates and levels of taxation, neglected. It is shown that, as far as Greek entrepreneurship is concerned, the adverse effects of the system of taxation came not from the level of taxes, but mostly from a series of issues that increased its perceived unfairness and illegitimacy. Some of such issues were the complexity and frequent change of legislation, the insufficient organisation of the tax bureaus as well as the lack of adequate training and arbitrariness of the members of tax services. The evidence presented here suggests that Baumol's model can be enriched by taking into consideration these aspects of taxation too.

This article analyses the interaction between the system of taxation and business in Greece during the crucial period of the military dictatorship (1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974) in order to throw light on the Greek version of Mediterranean capitalism that developed in the post-Second World War framework and how it affected business doing in the country. It will be shown that through this type of capitalism clientelism and 'shadow' or informal economic transactions ended up being prevalent features of the current Greek economic reality.1 During and prior to the period analysed here Greece's political system was a constitutional monarchy.

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