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Introduction
Within the domain of management and organization studies, organization history has emerged as a subfield (Godfrey et al., 2016), yet there remains a lack of scholarly research on historical research methods (Dunkerley, 2013; Wadhwani and Decker, 2018). Despite much research on social issues within management and organization studies, historical research interest and methods exploring business and society represent a neglected area (Stutz and Sachs, 2018; Warren and Tweedale, 2002), including those related to marginalized issues. Marginalized issues have received attention elsewhere within the broader social sciences stream, supported by intellectual movements, leading to development of focused scholarship, e.g. subaltern studies, disability studies and race and gender studies. Marginalized issues refer to significant yet disregarded social voices including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexuality and religion. Manifestation of these issues as complex workplace challenges for modern businesses necessitates attention to the neglected agenda of historical inquiry and the design of suitable approaches for their study within management research.
The purpose of historical research inquiry into marginalized issues within management is to engage with the historical past to ascertain the future, requiring explaining the past using the present (Cohen et al., 2007) and creating “historical awareness” (Connaway and Powell, 2010, p. 245). This is significant for three reasons (Tosh, 2015, pp. 8-11):
establishing the “difference,” i.e. the distinction/shift between “our own age from all previous ages,” e.g. the relationship between business and specific marginalized issues in the past and now;
setting the “context,” which requires explaining the past and “placing it in its historical setting,” e.g. examining the business response or engagement with specific marginalized issues in social, political, or economic contexts; and
identifying the “historical process,” i.e. the interconnectedness between events so that they can be understood and interpreted more holistically “than if they were viewed in isolation.”
In this article, we discuss the interpretive approach for conducting historical research inquiry for marginalized societal issues within management research. We propose a multi-method framework for studying and analyzing the historical relationship of business and marginalized issues. We elucidate the framework by referring to our study on the specific marginalized issue of disability and the business response to it in nineteenth-century colonial India and post-independence, pre-liberalization India (1947-1991). We frame our discussions...