History under Cover: The Problematic Relationship between Business Management and the Past

This article is intended as the introductory chapter to the special issue on Business History and its Value for Managers, which also includes contributions from Peter Clark, Terry Gourvish, John Wilson and Andrew Thomson. Maielli's contribution identifies some of the main components of the Business History research agenda and analyses whether and to what extent they might contribute to the development of actionable knowledge for business decision making. After setting the theoretical framework, the article analyses the other contributions to the issues and their implications with regard to the relevance of Business History for managers. While Wilson and Thomson support History of Management as a core component of Business Management academic curricula, Gourvish confines the main cognitive domain of Business History in the analysis of the past. Finally, Clark and Maielli see History acting ‘under cover’ at the core of many disciplinary approaches, inspiring interdisciplinary research agendas and the development of analytical tools for decision making.