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Suggests that a systems approach to the management of organization change is something most business schools assume to be a recent development. Presents a 2,500‐year‐old example of an extremely successful systemic transformation, one which provides a useful stimulus to aid thinking in this field today. Of particular interest is the ancients’ appreciation of an aspect which is often paid little mind in modern systems interventions ‐ organizational mythology, and the notion that perhaps the most important aspect in managing change is providing continuity.

While the benefits of open innovation (OI) and crowdsourcing (CS) for solutions to R&D problems have been widely promoted in the last ten years, their appropriateness for organisations specialising in providing R&D services has not been explicitly considered. This paper aims to examine an R&D organisation's response to increased adoption of OI and CS, highlight their drawbacks in this context, and analyse how and why the alternative of problem‐sourcing (PS) proved more effective.

The paper provides an in‐depth documentation and analysis of an initiative called: The “What's Your Problem New Zealand?” (WYPNZ) challenge. The use of a single case and qualitative approach allows the development of an illustrative, rich description and is suited to studying unique and novel events.

In the context of professional R&D organisations, a range of benefits of CS for R&D problems rather than solutions were identified, including generating a potential pipeline of projects and clients as well as avoiding the challenge to the professional status of the organisation's research capability. An unexpected side‐effect was that the reputation of the research organisation as open, accessible and helpful was greatly enhanced. The success of the PS approach to CS for R&D provides insight into how some of the pitfalls of OI/CS can be better understood and potentially managed.

The PS model provided by the “WYPNZ” initiative represents a new strategic possibility for R&D organisations that complements their traditional competencies by drawing on the openness that OI and CS seek to leverage. As such, it can provide insights for other organisations wishing to make use of the connectivity afforded by OI/CS in an alternative mode to that typically in use and reported in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the limitations of what the field of strategic management sees as its military foundations.

Categorizes and synthesizes the critical historical approach of Michel Foucault and uses this to interrogate assumptions made about military approaches to strategy in the strategic management literature.

Suggests that there is a much broader range of military approaches to strategy than that which has been seen as a foundation stone of strategic management, and that drawing on this broader range of perspectives can encourage new thinking about strategic management.

While the historical survey upon which this hypothesis is developed is by no means exhaustive, it should encourage further investigation of different approaches to military strategy and how these might be applied to think differently in business settings.

This paper should encourage practitioners to question their often overly simplistic views of military strategy and to see this arena as a potentially rich seam of ideas that could be applied in business.

This is the first journal article to develop a clear method that draws on the many strands of Foucault's historical approach and apply this to fruitfully deconstruct a particular aspect of the field of management's assumed heritage.

The purpose of this article is to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Evolution of Management Thought (EMT), a critically acclaimed text in management and organizational studies for its value in historicizing the practice of management.

The authors asked Daniel Wren and Arthur Bedeian in their own words to their contribution. In addition, the authors offer commentary and critique of 16 leading management historians who share their reflections on the intellectual significance of Wren and Bedeian, and the punctuation of EMT as a canonical text in the field of management history.

The legacy of Wren and Bedeian can be felt across the academy of historical research on business and organizations. Their work has separately made significant contributions to management studies but together they have forged a fruitful partnership that has given rise to multiple generations of scholars and scholarship that continue to shape the field to this day.

The contribution of the authors in this article is to mark the significant milestone of EMT’s five-decade success by hearing from the authors themselves about their longstanding success as well as giving space to critique about the past, present and future of our collective historical scholarship shaped by Wren and Bedeian’s legacy.

Management history has in the past 15 years witnessed growing enthusiasm for “critical” research methodologies associated with the so-called “historic turn”. This paper aims to argue, however, that the “historic turn” has proved to an “historic wrong turn”, typically associated with confused and contradictory positions. In consequence, Foucault’s belief that knowledge is rooted in discourse, and that both are rooted in external structures of power, is used while simultaneously professing advocacy of White’s understanding that history is fictive, the product of the historian’s imagination.

This paper explores the intellectual roots of the historic (wrong) turn in the idealist philosophies of Nietzsche, Croce, Foucault, White and Latour as well as the critiques that have been made of those theories from within “critical” or “Left” theoretical frameworks.

Failing to properly acknowledge the historical origin of their ideas and/or the critiques of those ideas – and misrepresenting all contrary opinion as “positivist” – those associated with the historic (wrong) turn replicate the errors of their theoretical champions. The author thus witnesses a confusion of ontology (the nature of being) and epistemology (the nature of knowledge) and, consequently, of “facts” (things that exist independently of our fancy), “evidence” (how ascertain knowledge of a fact) and “interpretation” (how I connect evidence to explain an historical outcome).

Directed toward an examination of the conceptual errors that mark the so-called “historic turn” in management studies, this article argues that the holding contradictory positions is not an accidental by-product of the “historic turn”. Rather, it is a defining characteristic of the genre.

The purpose of this paper is to review the recent book A New History of Management (NHM) and to discuss the strengths and limitations of the book versus traditional management history as practiced by Wren and Bedeian.

I analyze NHM by looking at the evidence presented in the book versus the historical record.

Although there are some strengths to NHM, the scholars often fail to address the larger historical evidence, which reduces the value of their work.

The value is to start a discussion of the nature of management history by discussing traditional versus postmodern history. Hopefully, the authors can commence with a dialogue to further historical research.