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Blast from the past

Reflecting on Old Work and the Journey

Stephanie Decker FAcSS FBAM

Jun 6

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“Solid Intentions” — 10 years after

I’ll be presenting some fairly old work on 10 June at a joint online event between Warwick Business School and the University of Stellenbosch Business School. “Solid Intentions” is an article I published in a lovely special issue in Organization on Memory and Narrative in 2014, so it will be 11 years old when I present it this month.

Tropical modernism was a strategic corporate choice that positioned multinationals as partners in Africa’s future development in the mid-20th century (image from Decker, 2014)

It's fairly unusual to talk about something quite this old because, obviously, if it was published in 2014, the work on it actually took place years before that. As we all know, there are a couple of good reasons for that. In discussions about the purpose of the session and the network, the organizers were looking for something on history and memory that was relevant and ideally located on the African continent.

It's not that I haven't published anything on Africa or history and memory since then, but I haven't published anything at the intersection of the two since 2014. I've published mostly business history and one contemporary piece on Africa, and I've published on history and memory, but not really about Africa. This is why we ultimately selected this piece, but it also feels kind of unusual to go back to a piece after such a long time.

Management and Organization History at 20 (well, 19)

But this is not the only blast from the past. I also had a very nice invitation to work on a piece for MOH for its 20th anniversary edition. Perhaps because I've been primed by the invitation to the Warwick event, but I decided to take them up on their offer to reflect on a piece that I published in MOH. And this is one I often reflect on because I always thought it's a pretty good story as to how the article was written and developed, what I learned from it, and what it meant to me. It's the “Silence of the Archives” article that was published in 2013 in MOH (Decker, 2013), and that in many ways changed the trajectory of what I was researching and publishing in a way that I did not anticipate then...