Rediscovering Hegel: The ‘New Historicism’ In Organization And Management Studies

This paper advances the argument that a particular form of culturally, rather than materialistically, based historicism dominated organization and management studies in the 1980s. the 1970s were dominated by a materialistically based form of historicism in which economic, technological and organizational imperatives were deemed to drive the evolutionary dynamics, trajectories and outcomes of institutional and organizational transformation. In sharp contrast, the 1980s witnessed the rise of culturally or ideationally based forms of historicist thought and analysis in which the explanatory and political significance of factors located in a society's or organization's ‘material base’ were substantially downgraded in favour of variables embedded in their ‘ideological superstructures’. the paper traces the emergence, progress and implications of this cultural historicism in relation to four distinct, but interrelated discourses ‐ enterprise, flexibility, quality and human resource management. It also suggests that this analysis raises a number of fundamental theoretical and methodological issues concerned with three different approaches to the study of the interconnections between intellectual and institutional change in ‘late’ or ‘post’‐modern societies ‐ that is, the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge, and technologies of government. the paper concludes with the argument that each of these broad approaches needs to be brought into clearer theoretical and methodological alignment in order to develop a more subtle and sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of, and elective affinity between, intellectual and institutional change. It also suggests that this need for a clearer theoretical alignment between these three approaches will become particularly pressing in the 1990s as an alternative discourse of citizenship emerges to challenge the ideological hegemony of the discourse of enterprise with its roots in cultural historicism.