The summer months of July and August have been very active for the research team and some important changes have taken place. Michael went to the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) conference in Athens from July 3-5. EGOS is a really interesting conference because you stay choose a track which is based on a special interest theme in Organization Studies and stay in your track for the three days of the conference. Michael entered the Tracing the Past: Historical Methods for Studying Entrepreneurship, Imagination, and Innovation. This was a superb track, organised by Professor Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School), Dr Elena Giovannoni (Birmingham Business School) and Dr Adam J. Nix (Birmingham Business School). It was great to spend three days with management and organizational historians from Europe, North America and Asia, particularly with Dr Nicholas Wong and Dr Michael Price who are colleagues from Northumbria University. Michael presented on organizational repair focused deinstitutionalization and received some excellent feedback. The paper essentially looks at the deinstitutionalization of house magazines as the main form of communication with employees and its replacement by internal communication (IC) in the 1960s and 1970s. For further information on this see our source of the month for April 2025 / Industrial Welfare Society, Research methods Also see out current source of the month for September 2025 which examines the macroenvironmental reasons for why IC was established in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s.
EGOS 2025. Research Sub-Theme 41 Tracing the Past: Historical Methods for Studying Entrepreneurship, Imagination, and Innovation.
Michael Presenting at EGOS.
In late July (25-29) Michael and Mick headed to Copenhagen where they participated in the Academy of Management (AOM) annual conference. This was a huge even at the Bella Conference Centre in Copenhagen which housed 13000 attendees from across the globe making this the largest management conference in the world. We had arranged a Professional Development Workshop (PDW) on the History of IC. Both Michael and Mick presented in a well-attended workshop and were accompanied by Dr Kevin Tennent (University of York, School for Business and Society), Dr Andrew Smith (Birmingham Business School) and Professor Aoki Katsuki (Meiji University). We hope to apply for a Special Issue in a business history journal on the history of IC based on this workshop and the similar panel we held at the Association of Business Historians in Belfast in June. We would like to thank Professor William (Bill) Foster and the Management History Division at the AOM for hosting the PDW.
Finally, it is with great regret that we announce that Emily has left the project to take up her own funded grant at Leeds University on the AHRC Catalyst scheme. A huge congratulations to Emily for winning funding from such a prestigious and highly competitive source. We would like to thank her for the work she has done on the project and wish her the best at Leeds. We are extremely, pleased, however, to announce that Professor Alan McKinlay, formerly of Newcastle University, has replaced Emily and joined the project. This is a huge win in many respects. Alan has been a renowned global scholar in management and organizational history for over thirty years and is well known and highly respected in the field. He is an expert in a number of areas including the history of labour and industrial relations, internal labour markets, office work, microhistory, managerial power and Foucault which are all highly relevant to the project. Alan will also provide much needed skills and experience in the writing up of impact case studies which was a major gap in the previous research team and is crucial for a successful project. He is currently writing an article for the project looking at managerial authority and the rise of IC in the 1960s and 1970s using a Foucauldian perspective. The relationship between managerial power and communication is a central theme in the history of IC (see our source of the month for September) which is something that we have occasionally referred to, but never exclusively focused on. This is a highly important piece of research that will contribute to our understanding of the history of IC. We wish Alan the best in this endeavour.
The project is advancing very strongly in its final year. We have finished our data collection and currently have two articles in revise and revision in major academic global academic journals and have finished the first draft of a third which Professor John Hassard (Manchester Business School), another highly regarded academic in organizational studies and management and organizational history, is helping us with. We would like to thank John for his assistance and look very forward to working with him. We are also planning to hold a two day workshop in April or May at Northumbria University on the history of IC which we will invite practitioners and academics to. Once we have secured a date we will send out a call for papers. Finally, Michael is going to Nashville in October to attend the two day practitioner conference UNITE 25 hosted by the intranet and employee experience (EX) solutions provider Unily. This will be a great experience and opportunity to discover the latest developments in intranets, EX, IC and that hot potato AI!! We will keep you updated in our next blog post.