Facing the Normative Challenges: The Potential of Reflexive Historical Research

The computational view on reasoning

Both the Eisenhardt and the Gioia template struggle to acknowledge the human context of scientific knowledge production. As defining characteristics, research guided by these inductive templates makes a tremendous effort to demonstrate the “links between the data and the induction of [ . . . ] new concept[s]” (Gioia et al., 2013, p. 4) to reach a “theory which closely fits the data” (Eisenhardt, 1989, p. 541). However, as Ketokivi and Mantere (2010) have argued, induction, on which both templates rely, is a philosophical dilemma: A theory does not logically emerge from repeated observation. To address but not solve the dilemma, both templates use the strategy to emphasize the computational manner in describing their research practice (Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013). In contrast to Gadamer’s cognitive view of the process of understanding, the computational view appeals to following explicit scientific rules and guidelines for justifying inductive arguments (Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013). By relying on the realist scientific stance, the templates stress “researcher invariance,” that is, any researcher would discover that the same generalization emerges from the data (Ketokivi & Mantere, 2010).

This description of qualitative research practice, however, is unrealistic (Ketokivi & Mantere, 2010). Gadamer (2013) stresses that research is always done from a particular point of view: It will never reach an objective, that is, a value-free, state. On the contrary, if scholars neglect to reflect their specific values, the research endeavor remains inevitably political, as Ghoshal (2005) points out. According to Ghoshal (2005), it was the unquestioned set of unfavorable core assumptions in management research that led to the corporate crisis in 2001. Ghoshal (2005) calls it the self-fulfilling prophecy effect of theorizing. From Ghoshal’s seminal paper, we thus derive the pitfall of (inadvertently) crafting political narratives even when researchers affirm to be objective.

Political effects in theorizing

B&S scholars are invited to reflect on the interests their theories serve. For example, Heugens, van den Bosch, and van Riel’s (2002) positivist study on stakeholder engagement promotes two different narratives that might influence practice. On the one hand, their study encourages firms to adopt the practice of stakeholder engagement according to the B&S agenda. In this vein, Heugens and colleagues (2002) demonstrate the firms’ “very concrete competitive benefits from building mutually enforcing relationships with their external stakeholders” (Heugens et al., 2002, p. 57). On the other hand, the study also tells a subtler story. It legitimizes the introduction of genetically modified products by the Dutch food industry in the 1990s. Heugens and colleagues (2002) do so by (most likely unconsciously) tracing the events according to the meta-narrative of scientific progress (Boje, 1995): The industry, an agent of scientific progress, strives for continuous improvement for the good of all. As some “unbridgeable [partners]” are “against biotechnology” (Heugens et al., 2002, p. 53), the industry has to stem them by continuously providing “factually correct information” (Heugens et al., 2002, p. 47). With this subtext, the study (inadvertently) supports the interests of the powerful food industry in a political struggle not yet settled in the European context.

To sum up, research guided by both templates is at risk of failing to acknowledge or even recognize the human dimension of scientific reasoning. As a result, scholars might inadvertently craft political narratives, based on unreflected assumptions. Zald (1993, p. 524) has argued before that the realist stance is value-free only by appearance and leads scholars “to lack a nuanced base for the discussion of value choice.” We will follow Gadamer (2013) who emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the researcher as an active reasoner.

The positivist template and the research subjects’ norms

The positivist Eisenhardt (1989, p. 539) template seeks to “understand each [research] case individually and in as much depth as is feasible.” However, Dyer and Wilkins (1991) have argued in their rejoinder to Eisenhardt (1989) that the Eisenhardt template encourages scholars to uproot their research subjects from their context. This uprooting is necessary to establish timelessness and universal generalizability. In our sample of B&S articles, Näsi, Näsi, Phillips, and Zyglidopoulos (1997), for example, have stressed the fact that they studied non-American companies—an underrepresented setting in B&S research at the time. The idiosyncrasies of their research setting, the forestry industry of Finland and Canada, however, has had no impact on the results of the study. The particular context, if considered at all, is reduced to a mere factor that can be externalized (McLaren & Durepos, 2015).

A positivist approach to context has far-reaching consequences for the ability of scholars to deal with the research subjects’ norms. In an attempt to generate universal theory, scholars are at risk of committing “violence [against] the integrity of text” (Prasad, 2002, p. 21). In Gadamer’s view, scholars who decline to participate in the hermeneutic horizon of the research subjects fall prey to “forc[ing] the text to fit into the straitjacket of the[ir] own prejudices, categories, and constructs” (Prasad, 2002, p. 21). To illustrate this argument, we focus on Butterfield, Reed, and Lemak’s (2004) positivist study on stakeholder collaboration. By evaluating the influence factors on the success of collaborations, they state the following: “Not surprisingly, the interviewees once again perceived leadership (Category 47) as being important, but we were again interested to find that the interviewees viewed other moderating factors as being more central to alliance success than leadership” (Butterfield et al., 2004, p. 186). Here, without contesting the merits of the highly cited study, the question arises to which extent they render the informants’ statements as objective facts rather than consider them answers to specific questions asked in an interview (see also Potter & Hepburn, 2005, on methodological pitfalls of the use of interviews).

The constructionist template and the research subjects’ norms

The social constructionist ground assumptions underlying the Gioia template offer the scholars more appropriate guidelines to deal with the research subjects’ norms. In contrast to positivist research, scholars employing the Gioia template are intrinsically entangled with the norms of their research subjects, as they aim to grasp their informants’ values, intentions, and interpretations (Gioia et al., 2013, p. 6). However, scholars’ capacity for empathetic understanding is limited (Prasad, 2002), as scholars and research informants share their deep embeddedness in historical time. Gadamer (2013, p. 289) puts the limitations straightforwardly: “The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life,” that is, the hidden prejudices make “us deaf to what speaks to us” (Gadamer, 2013, p. 282).

A study by Cook and Barry (1995), who extensively cite Dennis Gioia’s earlier empirical work in the Method section, might be an illustrative example. After a careful analysis of the study, we suggest it illustrates the “fore-meanings that occupy the interpreter’s consciousness” (Gadamer, 2013, p. 306). As 20 years have passed since its publication, it is fair to say that Cook and Barry’s research endeavor appears to be influenced by some unnoticed prejudices. The tacit libertarian mindset broadly circulating in the “land of the free” (cf. Schlesinger, 1999) clearly preconcerts the cast appearing in their study on small businesses’ interaction with governmental policymakers. In the subtext of their paper, the role of the villain is assigned to the government “that seeks greater control over the small firm—through more stringent environmental laws, anti-discrimination rules, increased efforts at workplace safety, and so on” (Cook & Barry, 1995, p. 341). By studying the attempts of small business firms from this perspective, it is not surprising that they “often found stories characterized less as epic heroes’ journeys and more as tales of the ‘hapless victim’ or the ‘Lilliputians versus Gulliver.’” (Cook & Barry, 1995, p. 340). With Gadamer (2013, p. 296) we can take a step back and recognize that the theme and object of research are actually constituted by the unnoticed prejudices, which preconfigure the production of any knowledge. In this sense, Kieser (1994, p. 610, italics added) has argued that the scholarly “identification of actual organizational problems and of their appropriate remedies” is often shaped by “‘fashionable’ trends in organization theory and practice.”

To sum up the second normative challenge, the pitfall in using the templates is that scholars might fail to go beyond preunderstandings in contemporary discourse (Kieser, 1994). Preunderstandings, either theoretical or other beliefs circulating in a specific historical context, can unconsciously guide research. We will follow Gadamer (2013, p. 309) who points toward the creative role of temporal distance that serves as a filter to make scholars’ contemporary prejudices more self-evident.

Introducing the Political Firm Case

The Political Firm Case is part of a comprehensive historical research project that studies a firm’s purpose and its interactions with society throughout historical times. The firm under examination is the Swiss multinational Landis & Gyr (LG), which was a large family-owned and export-oriented manufacturer of measuring instruments. In our explorative research, we studied this company in the historical period of the Cold War (Table A1 in the Appendix indicates some key facts about LG and Switzerland during the period studied). In the empirical instance, which we call here the Political Firm Case, LG made the decision to no longer maintain its relations to customers behind the Iron Curtain and leave the respective markets. This, from today’s point of view, rather surprising decision was related to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising of October 1956 by Soviet troops, which subsequently gave rise to sharp reactions from the Swiss civil society that declared its solidarity with the Hungarian people. In our contextualizing research attempt, we soon learned that conservative and anti-communist pressure groups campaigned to break off all Swiss relations to the communist East long before the crisis. These campaigns attacked the official Swiss foreign policy that was based on the longstanding principle of neutrality and brought an issue to the political arena for export-oriented Swiss companies (i.e., to stop Eastern trade). This initial finding motivated us to pursue the question of why LG was susceptible to this public issue while most other firms continued pursuing regular business practices. From a theoretical standpoint, we used this case to examine the presuppositions of the recently introduced strategic cognition view of issue salience and firms’ responsiveness (Bundy, Shropshire, & Buchholtz, 2013). This theory, contributing to, and partly departing from, the literature on stakeholder salience (Mitchell, Agle, & Wood, 1997), describes the cognitive mechanisms that drive firms’ actions in response to issues that stakeholders of the firms raise or the general public demands from the firms.

In this article, we use this case as an illustration to illuminate the key characteristics of RHCS. For a more detailed discussion of the case, we refer to Stutz (2016). Figure 1 shows the chronology of the unfolding events on the organizational, national, and international level of analysis.

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Figure 1.

Timeline of Unfolding Events on Organizational, National and International Level (based on: Stutz, 2016).

Theory as prejudice

Both the Gioia and the Eisenhardt template refer to theories similar to research that employ a quantitative research design, that is, propositions that link key concepts (Gioia et al., 2013, p. 10). Following the logic of inductive reasoning, both templates burden the scholars with the “ideal of [a] clean theoretical state” (Eisenhardt, 1989, p. 536; in a similar fasihon also Gioia et al., 2013, p. 12) when starting case research, neglecting the influence of unnoticed prejudices on scholars. The approach of RHCS, in contrast, follows ideas of the interpretive research tradition in MOS that has incorporated some philosophical ideas of Gadamer and others (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007; Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011). Critical of the realist scientific paradigm, this literature emphasizes that all knowledge arises from a prejudged point of view, entangled with values and interests (Putnam, 2002). By relaxing the status of knowledge in this way, Alvesson and Kärreman (2007, p. 1278) bring forth an understanding of theories similar to Gadamer’s notion of the hermeneutic horizon that is constituted by prejudices: Theories equip scholars with “a line of reasoning, a metaphor, or other tools that give us a sense of what to expect.” To provide such a starting point for research, RHCS advises scholars to consult a broad range of theories and develop a set of presuppositions necessary for hermeneutic understanding.

The prejudice for the Political Firm Case

For our research endeavor that produced the Political Firm Case, we selected the stakeholder salience literature as the debate we wanted to contribute to, which is one of the core debates of the stakeholder theory (Freeman et al., 2010; Laplume, Sonpar, & Litz, 2008). In this debate, Bundy and colleagues (2013) have redefined stakeholder salience and departed from the initial theory of Mitchell and colleagues (1997) and the subsequent stream of literature. They changed the unit of analysis from assessing external stakeholder characteristics (such as power, legitimacy and urgency) to the organization’s “cognitive structure” (or rather interpretation systems), proposing it influences and directs managerial interpretations of stakeholder issues. By using Bundy and colleagues’ (2013) conceptualization as an initial illumination of our case, we developed the expectation that LG engaged with the public issue guided by the norms and values held in the particular organization. In the course of our research, we then reconsidered the preconceived theoretical explanation provided by Bundy and colleagues (2013).

The nature of historical sources

In the course of the “linguistic turn” in history, theorists of historiography questioned the epistemological status of sources and thereby challenged the positivist truth claims that objective knowledge about the past can be achieved (Hansen, 2012). By adopting this caution about the nature and limits of empirical material, RHCS approaches empirical materials in a different way than the well-known research templates. The Eisenhardt approach is, as discussed, at risk of considering the statements of its informants as objective facts. Also in constructionist research, Gioia and colleagues (2013, p. 3) convey their informants as “‘knowledgeable agents,’ namely, that people in organizations know what they are trying to do and can explain their thoughts, intentions, and actions.” RHCS stresses the opposite. Rather than assuming knowledgeable agents, RHCS characterizes informants by a more holistic conception of the human being, stating that we are dealing with everyday life people who are “looking forward into buzzing alternatives, armed with fragmentary information, rule-of-thumb analogies, and incomplete knowledge” (Scranton, 2014, p. 68). In other words, the informants are bound to their hermeneutic horizons (Gadamer, 2013).

To study everyday lives, the main empirical materials are naturalistic data and not interview data, which are mainly used in the prime templates. In contrast to interview data, which is often only able to reveal issues toward which scholars steer the conversations (Potter & Hepburn, 2005), scholars using naturalistic data have to find creative ways to work with what is there. This can be provocative for scholars and may lead to surprising findings.

In our study, we identified the company archive of LG as an appropriate main research site. The company archive, preserved in a public repository, contains empirical materials from 1896 to 1996 and its volume amounts up to 260 shelf yards. ² In the Political Firm Case research project, the preliminary strategy was to identify materials that provide insights into the firms’ engagement practices with the wider society. In the very beginning of the fieldwork in the archive, we started the collection of the material by looking through the consulting catalogues and thematic files of the archive to get an impression of the kind of records that had been preserved. It was in one of these files that we noticed an interesting episode in the history of the company (i.e., LG’s response to the Hungarian uprising) that later became the starting point for this theoretically motivated case study. From there, we then started to systematically collect any material related to LG’s approach to Eastern trade in the company archive, for instance, minutes of the BoD, correspondence letters, transcripts of speeches, internal reports, newspaper articles, and so on. It is important to note that we never considered these empirical materials to be a clear window into the company’s past (Decker, 2013), but saw them as intentionally constructed, value-laden, and ambiguous.

Source criticism

To make use of historical sources that are of an incomplete and ambiguous nature, RHCS relies on the methodological tool of source criticism (Kipping et al., 2014; Lipartito, 2014). Source criticism is a reflexive device for establishing arguments and for identifying the extent to which a historical source can be used to address a research question (Kipping et al., 2014). In dealing with data in such a reflexive way, it is important to understand that historians read “sources ‘against the grain’ […], inferring a meaning beyond, or even opposed to, what the sources were intended to mean” (Rowlinson et al., 2014, p. 256). With this operation, historians transform “traces [i.e., social documents] from the past into sources [i.e., research data]” (Hansen, 2012, p. 695), meaning that historical sources are made the very moment scholars use materials from the past to answer their research questions.

In our research endeavor, our main task was not to understand what actually happened but to understand how the informants created their reality in context and over time. Through source criticism, we concluded that part of the material (e.g., the BoD minutes) can account for analyzing the different organizational actors’ interpretations of the public issue, that is, meaning constructions or rationales used in the company. In documents referring to the particular episode, we were able to identify struggling narratives that were put forward to explain LG’s role during the crisis. Some managers argued quite simply that a business’ business is business. In contrast, other managers introduced the line of argument that a firm should be obliged to follow broader societal goals, defending the apparent “superior” values of the West against an “aggressive” Eastern bloc. In Gadamer’s (2013) terms, the material reveals the different horizons of the actors. These texts were then complemented with sources that allowed us to contextualize the expressions of the actors within the overall hermeneutic situation. For instance, we collected pamphlets of pro- and anti-Eastern trade advocates from the relevant period. This contextualization reflects our approach to understand an empirical instance within pregiven but dialectically improving understandings. This brings us to the last key characteristic.

Interpretive approach to challenge prejudices

RHCS adopts an interpretive approach to case research that is in sharp contrast to the two prime templates, which prejudge “the” case as an instance of the theory the scholars are inductively developing (Eisenhardt et al., 2016). Interpretive scholars, instead, as explicated by Alvesson and Kärreman (2011, p. 4), regard empirical case research as a practice “to enhance [scholars’] ability to challenge, rethink and illustrate theory.” In Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2007) language, scholars have to create a “breakdown” in understanding, in which prior theoretical propositions fail to make sense of an empirical instance. To provoke such breakdowns, Alvesson and Kärreman (2007) direct scholars to look at rather striking and idiosyncratic empirical examples and to mobilize a broad “repertoire of lenses” to critically open up alternative ways of framing the empirical instance.

RHCS, however, has an additional leverage effect. Gadamer (2013) points toward the significance of temporal distance, separating the researchers’ and the researched context, which may facilitate the creation of such breakdowns. As argued above, researchers bring to the act of understanding not only their theoretical expectations but also their whole situatedness within a historico-cultural context. In this respect, temporal distance “is not something that must be overcome” (Gadamer, 2013, p. 308). Rather, it is a productive condition enabling novel understandings, as temporal distance makes the taken-for-grantedness of prejudices, embedded in our historical time and place, intelligible (Gadamer, 2013). In our research, studying the early Cold War period was provoking because it gave us access to pretheoretical empirical material. By going back in time, we had the opportunity to study phenomena not yet “distorted” by contemporary management discourses, such as CSR speech, trained in management education (Laamanen, Lamberg, & Vaara, 2016). Temporal distance, thus, provides a reflexive space in which present-day prejudices can be filtered out (Gadamer, 2013).

The hermeneutic circle

To facilitate an understanding of empirical instances, the so-called “hermeneutic circle” is the key concept to describe the research practice (Gadamer, 2013). It describes a practice in which understanding can only be achieved through considering the “whole” and the “parts,” whereas “the part [can only be] understood from the whole and the whole from the inner harmony of its part” (Palmer, 1969, p. 77 cited in Prasad, 2002, p. 17). In other words, scholars might start their research with a preunderstanding, the “whole,” to engage in a dialectic dialogue with the empirical instance, the “part.” A productive dialogue, then, leads to a novel understanding of the “whole.” This research practice is in sharp contrast to inductive approaches, in which theory seems to emerge computationally from the data by way of extensive coding. Hermeneutic understanding rather emphasizes the cognitive aspects of understanding where scholars are seen as active, historically embedded reasoners.

In our research endeavor, we started with a theoretical expectation proposed by Bundy and colleagues (2013) and some preunderstandings about the historical context in which the events unfolded (e.g., secondary literature by other historians, such as Tanner, 1999). It is important to note here that the “context” is not a given but needs to be defined by the scholars (Prasad, 2002). In this explorative attempt, scholars can “zoom in” to decipher the empirical instance, but also “zoom out” to see the antecedents and consequences over a long period of time (Wadhwani & Bucheli, 2014). In our empirical case, we took the large-scale political environment of the Cold War period into account, as well as the specific cultural, political, and economic context of Switzerland, but also proceeding events on the organizational level, such as the confiscation of LG property by communist Eastern countries that had occurred years before the empirical instance (see Figure 1).

Abductive reasoning

The scientific mode of reasoning that describes the practice of the application of the hermeneutic circle is abduction, that is, inference to the best explanation (Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013). The general logic of abduction is to turn surprising facts into matters of course: When scholars find a conflict between the empirical instance and the existing theoretical postulation, they attempt to integrate the anomalies of the empirical instance into the initial explanatory scheme through a search process for the new best explanation that covers the anomalies (Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013). In our study, the empirical instance—the termination of customer relations to Eastern countries—could not be explained by the prior theoretical propositions by Bundy and colleagues (2013). In particular, our analysis revealed that LG’s decision to terminate customer relations with eastern European countries draws on narratives from the broader socio-cultural context rather than on prevailing norms and values of the focal organization. Through contextualizing, we came to know that conservative and anti-communist pressure groups coined the political narrative about the political role of trade long before, aiming at adjusting business interests with the defense of the “free” Western world. These findings suggested that the external environment generates and justifies the firm-specific sensemaking processes, a finding that created a breakdown because prior propositions by Bundy and colleagues (2013) did not take this into account. This breakdown offered us an opportunity to examine the role of the social and political environment on the mechanisms that drives a firm’s actions regarding stakeholder issues more comprehensively (Stutz, 2016).

To sum up, RHCS has guided us toward critiquing and reflexively elaborating on existing theory by looking at empirical instances in context and over time. In explicating the three key characteristics of RHCS, we brought forth reflexive ideas concerning theories, empirical material, and research procedures that allow pursuit of the research agenda of the grander aims while simultaneously contributing to a theoretical debate.

Challenging assumptions embedded in CSR research

We have argued that RHCS has reflexive concerns about theories and aims at challenging and refining them. Our argument suggests that empirical instances in the past might stimulate us to question our contemporary concepts, because the separation between the scholars’ contemporary context and the research context might provoke scholars to be surprised by the data and encourage them to engage in new ways of thinking about a phenomenon.

As a promising avenue for this kind of research, we suggest that scholars might begin to investigate more profoundly the ground assumptions in CSR research, for instance, in the literature about the political role of business (Matten & Crane, 2005; Scherer & Palazzo, 2007; Scherer et al., 2014; Schrempf-Stirling, Palazzo, & Phillips, 2016). To examine the assumptions embedded in this literature, the recent historical study by Djelic and Etchanchu (2015) can serve as an intriguing example for further historical research, although it is not based on in-depth analysis of archival records but on archival work of other historians. Similar to Gadamer, they regard theoretical concepts as both historically and ideologically embedded and analyze political CSR as “a particular and contextual form of business–society interactions that reflects and reveals certain institutional and cultural conditions, particular relations of power and a given ideological and value grounding” (Djelic & Etchanchu, 2015, p. 4). To uncover the taken-for-grantedness of political CSR (as articulated by Matten & Crane, 2005), Djelic and Etchanchu (2015) confront the set of presuppositions of political CSR with alternative historical patterns of business–society interactions. Among other findings, their study reveals that private actors have always played a political role and it shows how the nature, extent, and impact of that political role changed in conjunction with the dominant ideologies underpinning the particular business–society interactions.

In accordance with this study, we suggest that RHCS provides the methodological guidelines of how in-depth historical research can challenge the assumptions in contemporary literature. To transform what is commonly seen as unquestioned truths in our concepts, scholars might also be inspired by the heuristic categories of assumptions provided by Alvesson and Sandberg (2011). For instance, political CSR might hold an ideological assumption about the role of the nation state. We hope that historical research can further contribute to this influential stream of CSR research by challenging, refining, and elaborating on its core concepts.

Approaching social context in CSR theorizing

We have presented RHCS as a context-sensitive methodology. To unleash this potential, a possible avenue of investigation involves applying RHCS to the branch of CSR research that examines the role of social context in CSR practices (Aguilera, Rupp, Williams, & Ganapathi, 2007; Matten & Moon, 2008). Athanasopoulou and Selsky (2015, p. 354) have recently called for more “in-depth and context-intensive research,” proposing that CSR researchers should incorporate multiple levels of social context more deliberately and study their interrelations. While they do not outline how scholars could approach this research agenda methodologically, their call can be appropriately answered by applying RHCS as a context-sensitive methodology.

RHCS is context sensitive in multiple ways: Scholars might start their empirical research by engaging with different theoretical perspectives that provide scholars with unlikely initial illuminations, insights, and preunderstandings to study different facets of social worlds. Scholars guided by RHCS could combine, as Athanasopoulou and Selsky (2015) have suggested, institutional, cultural, and cognitive perspectives, each addressing distinct context levels. Scholars interested in exploring the conditions in which CSR initiatives emerge may then find in the hermeneutic circle an appropriate analytical tool to employ an analysis on multiple levels of context in a single study. In hermeneutic analysis, scholars increase their understanding in a spiral movement, in which they contextualize the empirical instance by gradually moving from a low level of context toward higher levels. Historical research uses heterogeneous types of naturalistic data that help to understand issues on micro-, meso-, and macro-levels.

Furthermore, RHCS directs scholars to reflexive concerns with “context,” recognizing competing contexts. McLaren and Durepos (2015) lamented that context is one of the most undertheorized terms across all research paradigms and rarely becomes a part of what is studied. Instead of treating context as a “fixed or pre-existing container” into which researchers can place phenomena, McLaren and Durepos (2015) propose to take contexts as socially constructed phenomena seriously. To account for the complexity of the lived world, they make a case to work with a variety of contexts rather than different levels of context. In this respect, researchers can find conceptual guidance in Gadamer’s thinking, the major philosophical-conceptual underpinning of RHCS. According to Gadamer, social groups construct their very own hermeneutic horizons, which shape distinct understandings, even though they are situated in the same overall hermeneutic situation. We suggest that RHCS research may contribute to a more critical view of context and expand and enrich our understanding of CSR behavior in multiple interrelated levels of social context.

Converging “grander aims” and theorizing efforts

We have primarily argued that the “grander aims” of B&S scholarship are an obstacle for the application of the two well-known prime templates discussed above: The templates are committed to the scientific realist view for studying organizations and make scholars conceal their own norms and beliefs. RHCS, in contrast, allows scholars to deliberately acknowledge their agenda. In this regard, we propose that RHCS research can particularly add to approaches within stakeholder theory (Freeman et al., 2010; Post, Preston, & Sachs, 2002). Stakeholder theory presents itself more as a worldview with a “set of unifying ideas” or a “genre” of management research (Freeman et al., 2010, p. 64) than a scientific theory. Indeed, its value-laden core assumptions are carefully conceptualized out of the “theoretical ether” (Gioia, 1999, p. 230) to inform business decision making on normative grounds. Inspired by the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, the research agenda laid out by Freeman and colleagues aims to generate “insights that help us to lead better lives” (Freeman et al., 2010, p. 75). Any generated knowledge is, thus, assessed according to whether it is useful for the advancement of morally legitimate business practices.

RHCS is a reflexive methodology that can help ground stakeholder theory in practical reality. To be specific, RHCS acknowledges that not all textual interpretations are equally valid. In the operation of the hermeneutic circle, scholars can reflexively filter out illegitimate prejudices by going beyond the surface of the empirical instances studied (Prasad, 2002). In this regard, Tadajewski’s (2017) recent historical study of the Rotary Club is a promising starting point. Examining the key ideas about social responsibilities of business promoted by this organization in the early 20th century, he uses the historical case to underscore the lack of validity of the so-called separation thesis, that is, that business and moral decision making should and can be clearly differentiated. Indeed, values and facts are completely entangled (Putnam, 2002). We share Tadajewski’s (2017, p. 23) conclusion that

an extensive program of research that details the close connections between business practice and ethical responsibility can provide the intellectual tool to start to revise negative public perceptions [i.e., the view that has permeated popular culture, with business practice frequently depicted as “amoral”].

In RHCS, theorizing efforts and grander aims converge to “change the underlying narrative about business” (Freeman et al., 2010, p. 63).