Insightful empirical knowledge in grounded theory and historical organization studies

In this chapter we address questions regarding how knowledge, developed through empirical observation, is generated and recognized as insightful within management and organization studies. We focus particularly on grounded theory’s pragmatic approach to generating knowledge but argue that this has assigned a privileged ontological position to proximate, real-time observations in the field over historical observations that are distributed over wider spans of time and space. We argue that this lack of attention to historical observation(s) limits the practical usefulness of grounded theory in management and organization studies. We suggest that recent work toward the development of historical organization studies as an emergent domain of scholarly inquiry holds promise for generating empirical knowledge that can help management and organization studies to achieve greater practical resonance based on a broader view of empirical observation. We explore how grounded theory can be problematized and adapted for generating insightful knowledge from historical observations.