Corporate social responsibility before CSR: Practices at Aluminium du Cameroun (Alucam) from the 1950s to the 1980s

History in corporate social responsibility: Reviewing and setting an agenda

“…Since the initial calls for a "historic turn" in MOS (Clark & Rowlinson, 2004;Kieser, 1994;Zald, 1993; see also Rowlinson, 2015), an emerging network of scholars have done much preparatory work to bring history and organisation theory (back) together, especially since 2014 (Kipping & Üsdiken, 2014;Maclean et al, 2016;Rowlinson et al, 2014;Vaara & Lamberg, 2016;Wadhwani & Bucheli, 2014;see Decker, 2016, for an overview). Arguably, this intellectual movement has successfully established a new methodological paradigm within MOS, called historical organisation studies (Godfrey et al, 2016).…”

“…By using the idea of historical organisation studies, I rely on its key principles designed to relieve the disciplinary tensions between (business) historians and organisation theorists (Maclean et al, 2016). In particular, I regard the criteria of "dual integrity" as the most important, that is, the studies should be deemed authentic within both disciplinary realms (Maclean et al, 2016, pp.…”

“…As these contributions have laid a solid groundwork, the literature has further classified and developed a variety of methodological alternatives, built for instance on differences in onto-epistemological assumptions (Vaara & Lamberg, 2016) or in the epistemic purpose and mode of enquiry (Maclean et al, 2016). Taking into account the variety of assumptions about history and the methodological alternatives, I propose that historical CSR studies can make use of unique intellectual starting points likely leading to original scholarly insights.…”

“…However, given that the methodological knowledge about historical research practices has only recently been made available to organisation theorists, it is encouraging the see examples that already blend history and organisational theorising. Kaplan and Kinderman (2017), for instance, choose a conceptualising approach to history (Maclean et al, 2016) to provide both a significant contribution to CSR historiography and develop a theory of business-led diffusions of management practices. Further, scholars have begun to differentiate the subject matter of historical CSR studies by incorporating interpretive understandings of history.…”

“…Essentially, I draw on the notion of historical organisation studies that describes a creative synthesis between history and organisation theory (Maclean, Harvey, & Clegg, 2016; see also Godfrey et al, 2016). For creating an intellectual space that is meaningful for both business historians and CSR scholars, I first lay the groundwork by recognising and reconciling discrepant disciplinary and field-level traditions.…”