The publication of The Handbook of Historical Methods for Management signals both a consolidation and a renewal of the “historic turn” in management and organization studies (MOS). It arrives at a moment when scholars have moved beyond arguing for history’s legitimacy within management research and are now grappling with how to use history methodologically, to generate theory, challenge assumptions and reimagine organizational knowledge itself. As a scholar and teacher in the field, I approached this review from a feminist historiographical perspective, and read this collection not only for what it says about how to do historical work but also for what it reveals about who is positioned to do that work, whose histories are privileged and what methodological commitments shape the practice of writing the past into management studies.Decker, Foster and Giovannoni have curated a volume that ambitiously reclaims the question of method, a dimension often overshadowed by conceptual or theoretical discussions in management history. The editors explicitly aim to “reinvigorate historical methods in management and organizational studies by providing guidance on historical methods and methodologies from multiple perspectives and approaches” (p. 2). Their project is both retrospective and prospective: it captures how far the field has come since early calls to integrate history and organization theory, while also setting a new agenda for methodological innovation.The Handbook is organized into four sections that move progressively from reflection to application. The first, “Perspectives on Historical Methods,” situates readers in the philosophical and epistemological terrain of the field, addressing questions such as what constitutes historical knowledge and how the past is theorized through narrative, rhetoric and memory. The second, “Historical Data and Sources,” explores both traditional and emerging materials: archives, oral histories, case studies, institutional histories and the sensory or embodied dimensions of sources. The third, “Historical Analysis,” brings forward interpretive strategies including hermeneutics, critical realism, microhistory, grounded theory and Foucauldian counter-history. Finally, “Historical Research for Organizations and Society” showcases empirical exemplars that apply these methods to questions of organizational identity, corporate responsibility, postcolonial historiography and Indigenous ontology.This careful structuring produces what the editors call a multi-paradigmatic conversation about history. The reader encounters not a single formula for historical work but a variety of choices and tensions. Some chapters are highly pragmatic, offering procedural advice on archival research or data triangulation; others are provocations that question the very boundaries of what counts as method. Bastien and Coraiola’s chapter on conversational inquiry, for instance, exemplifies how historical research can bridge community knowledge and organizational memory, animating Indigenous living pasts that challenge linear temporalities. Similarly, contributions on digital archives and born-digital artifacts extend our sense of what the archive even is and how organizational histories are increasingly shaped by digital infrastructures.The Handbook therefore performs an important service in pluralizing the practices of history work in MOS. It refuses to hierarchize epistemologies, placing postcolonial, genealogical, ethnographic and positivist traditions in dialogue rather than opposition. For early-career scholars, this pluralism is liberating. It models how diverse philosophical commitments can coexist within the same intellectual project. Yet as the editors note, pluralism is not an end in itself. It is a recognition that organizational histories are situated, relational and incomplete. In this sense, the volume mirrors the broader shift within MOS toward embracing complexity and multiplicity rather than seeking theoretical closure.Reading across the Handbook, I was struck by how consistently the chapters highlight the historian’s dual identity as both practitioner and theorist. This framing is rarely explicit, yet it emerges through methodological choices and narrative voice. Doing history, the collection reminds us, is not a neutral act of retrieval. Every interpretive decision, what to include, what to silence, how to frame temporal relationships, is also theoretical work.This recognition is crucial for MOS, where methodological debates often privilege epistemological correctness over interpretive creativity. Historical research, as these authors show, is an act of craft and judgment: it requires sensitivity to sources, narrative coherence and theoretical imagination. In several chapters, particularly those exploring hermeneutic analysis and narrative construction, I see how historians translate fragmentary traces into meaningful organizational stories. Method becomes a form of theory-making, not merely data handling.This raises important questions about scholarly accountability and voice. If the historian is both author and actor, what ethical responsibilities follow? How do we navigate the power inherent in storytelling, especially when those stories shape institutional memory, legitimacy or identity? These questions resonate with the feminist historiographical commitment of reflexivity: recognizing the researcher as situated and the act of writing as both interpretive and political (Bell et al., 2019; Wallach Scott, 1994).The editors’ decision to include diverse methodological exemplars underscores this point. By juxtaposing archival case studies with ethnographic and genealogical analyses, they remind readers that history is not a single epistemic stance but a field of methodological possibilities. The historian’s role, then, is not only to reconstruct the past but to mediate among competing narratives, temporalities and ethical obligations.One of the Handbook’s most admirable features is its embrace of epistemic pluralism. Yet pluralism always entails politics: choices about inclusion, legitimacy and boundaries. The editors acknowledge this directly, writing that “we are keenly aware of what is not here and who we do not hear from” (p. 10). This reflexivity is refreshing in a field where claims to comprehensiveness often mask exclusion.Still, pluralism and inclusivity are not synonymous. The volume’s multi-paradigmatic stance is impressive, but the politics of method remain unevenly distributed. The book celebrates postcolonial and Indigenous methodologies, yet feminist, queer and intersectional historiographies appear largely absent. The result is a kind of “methodological mosaic” in which some pieces shine more brightly than others.This imbalance matters because methodology is never neutral. To privilege certain methods or philosophical orientations is to reproduce implicit hierarchies of knowledge. Feminist scholars have long argued that methodological politics, who defines rigor, who authorizes data, whose experiences count as history, are central to the ethics of research (Harding et al., 2013). The Handbook opens space for this conversation but stops short of engaging it fully. A stronger engagement with feminist theory could have further problematized the field’s understanding of reflexivity, representation and effect in historical work.Nevertheless, the editors’ refusal to impose orthodoxy is itself a political act. By curating a genuinely dialogical collection, they model a kind of methodological democracy. Each chapter becomes a case in negotiating epistemic boundaries, and readers are invited to inhabit these tensions rather than resolve them.From our vantage point, one of the most notable silences in this volume lies in its limited engagement with feminist perspectives. While several chapters nod to issues of gender and power, none explicitly take up feminist historiography as method. This absence is especially striking given the centrality of feminist interventions in the historical and organizational disciplines more broadly, from Joan Scott’s call to treat gender as a category of historical analysis (Wallach Scott, 1986), to Patricia Yancey Martin’s (Martin, 2004) and Joan Acker’s (Acker, 2009; Acker and Van Houten, 1974) work on gendered organizations, to Mills and Helms Mills’s critical management histories (Mills, 2001, 2006; Mills and Mills, 2018).Feminist historiography challenges not only what we study but how we study it. It asks us to consider archives as gendered institutions, to recognize silences as meaningful data and to interrogate the conditions of authorship and authority in historical writing. In its current form, the Handbook touches these issues only indirectly. For instance, while postcolonial and Indigenous methodologies gesture toward relational and situated knowledges, they could have been deepened by explicit engagement with feminist theories of embodiment, care and intersectionality.This omission is an opportunity. It highlights the unfinished work of diversifying historical MOS. A future edition could, for example, include chapters on feminist oral history, intersectional archival practices or affective historiography and embodied approaches that foreground the emotional and corporeal dimensions of knowing the past. These methods could enrich the field’s understanding of reflexivity by showing how researchers’ identities and experiences shape what they see and what they render visible.The editors acknowledge such gaps openly, noting that “no handbook can be comprehensive” (p. 9). Yet the absence of feminist perspectives reflects a broader structural issue: the ongoing marginalization of gender as a methodological concern within MOS and management history. To realize the promise of methodological pluralism, the field must engage feminist and intersectional epistemologies not as add-ons but as central to the theorization of history itself.Another theme running through the Handbook, and one that warrants further reflection, is the distinction between studying history and crafting it. The former treats history as an object of analysis; the latter understands it as a creative and ethical act. Both are present in the volume, though not always in dialogue.The chapters on hermeneutics, narrative construction and critical realism illuminate how scholars interpret historical data. Yet others, particularly those engaging genealogy, microhistory and conversational inquiry, implicitly foreground the creative dimension of historiography: the crafting of stories, the shaping of temporal relationships and the ethical implications of representing others’ lives.This tension between study and craft is productive. It challenges the lingering positivism that sometimes underpins organizational history. Methodological rigor, in this view, does not mean eliminating subjectivity but managing it reflexively. As Decker (2013) has argued elsewhere, historical work in MOS is valuable precisely because it makes visible the production of organizational narratives.A reflexive historiography, then, is one that recognizes the historian’s positionality as a constitutive element of the story. Reflexivity is not self-indulgence; it is accountability. It requires scholars to ask: How do our theoretical commitments shape our reading of the past? How do our identities, gendered, racialized and institutional, structure our access to and interpretation of sources? These are not peripheral questions; they are methodological ones.In this respect, feminist historiography offers a powerful corrective. It insists that reflexivity is an ethical stance, not a methodological luxury. It also expands the notion of “data” to include silence, emotion and absence, the traces of what official histories exclude. Incorporating such reflexive frameworks could further advance the field’s methodological sophistication.One of the Handbook’s most forward-looking contributions lies in its engagement with what might be called the ethical and digital turns in historical research. Several chapters confront the evolving materiality of sources, archives that now exist online, data that circulate across platforms and the ethical dilemmas posed by digitization.Digital artifacts challenge the historian to rethink notions of permanence, authorship and ownership. Websites, social-media feeds and organizational databases generate vast quantities of trace data, but their ephemerality raises methodological questions: What counts as an archival record when digital memory can be edited, deleted or algorithmically shaped? These issues resonate with ongoing debates in digital humanities and critical archival studies, yet their implications for management history remain underexplored (Manoff, 2016; Gasparin et al., 2025).The Handbook’s engagement with these themes is timely. It encourages scholars to treat the digital as both a site and a subject of historical inquiry. At the same time, it raises ethical questions about data stewardship, consent and representation. Our approach to digital archives invites new ethical standards but also foregrounds the relational responsibilities of researchers to those whose data they interpret.Moreover, the ethical turn extends beyond the digital. Several chapters address the moral dimensions of historiography itself: the obligation to represent others with fairness, to recognize partiality and to avoid reproducing harm through scholarly narrative. These concerns align closely with feminist, decolonial and critical traditions that treat methodology as a moral practice.As the field continues to evolve, integrating these ethical sensibilities into methodological training will be essential. Doing so would equip emerging scholars to navigate not only the technical challenges of digital research but also the relational and affective complexities of working with historical subjects, human and nonhuman alike.An implicit meta-theme in the Handbook is the historicization of the “historic turn” itself. Two decades ago, scholars such as Maclean et al. (2016) conceptualized historical organization studies as the systematic integration of history and theory. Since then, the field has diversified, but questions of legitimacy and rigor persist. The Handbook situates itself within these debates yet signals a progress: rather than defending history’s place in MOS, it explores how history can transform organizational inquiry.This shift from justification to reflexivity mirrors broader trends in the social sciences. It reflects a growing awareness that the “past” invoked in organizational research is always constructed, mediated by contemporary concerns, theoretical frameworks and disciplinary norms. What distinguishes this Handbook is its willingness to foreground method as the site of that construction. By doing so, it invites readers to reflect not only on how they use historical data but also on how their methodological choices produce particular versions of the past.Reading The Handbook of Historical Methods for Management left us both appreciative and challenged. It is an impressive scholarly achievement that succeeds in recentering method at the heart of management history. Its scope is vast, its editorial vision generous and its commitment to pluralism evident throughout. It offers a map of methodological possibilities that can guide, provoke and inspire.Yet the volume also reveals the work that remains. Pluralism without feminist and intersectional engagement risks replicating the exclusions it seeks to redress. Methodological innovation must therefore be matched by ethical and epistemic inclusivity. A truly pluralist historiography would integrate feminist, queer and decolonial approaches not as supplementary perspectives but as core methods, each offering distinct ways of knowing, remembering and caring for the past.The enduring contribution of this Handbook lies in its invitation to treat method not as a set of tools but as a way of being in relation to history. Method orients us ethically and epistemologically toward the worlds we study and the narratives we craft. To write organizational history is to engage in care, for archives, for subjects, for readers and for the communities whose stories we tell. The volume consolidates the field’s achievements while gesturing toward the futures we have yet to imagine: feminist, reflexive, affective and digitally attuned. If history has become integral to management and organization studies, this volume reminds us that how we do history, ethically, creatively and inclusively, will determine what kind of field we continue to build.
K. Williams (Tue,) studied this question.