Performing Pan American Airways through coloniality : an ANTi-History approach to narratives and business history

2018

This paper centers on the role of narratives in business history from an ANTi-History perspective. We focus on the networked processes through which narratives are told of, for, and by multi-national companies embed the development of ‘new imperialism’ and coloniality. We set out to achieve this through a discussion and application of ANTi-History to a study of Pan American Airways and particularly its performance as a maturing multi-national company and its relationship to postcoloniality. In the process, we also hope to contribute to recent calls in business history for more explicit accounts of the methods used in the development of historical accounts. We are concerned to encourage ‘a n…

Introduction: Why to Study Ageing in Organisations?

2017

Questions related to ageing are shared widely in and between organizations. People are living longer and working longer than they used to earlier (Levinson 1978). The percentage of people over 60 years of age is growing rapidly worldwide, with one report estimating that by mid-century the number of people over 60 will triple to nearly two billion people. This tendency is evident especially in Europe and North America, which countries face the retiring of the baby-boom generation (Aaltio et al., International Journal of Work Innovation, 1(4), 323–329, 2016). The growing phenomenon of ageing has had and will have a major impact on the economy, and on social and work life (Davoudi et al., Futu…

HISTÓRIAS CORPORATIVAS E A IDEIA DA AMÉRICA LATINA

2021

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é contribuir para uma grande variedade de perspectivas teóricas e configurações empíricas para gerar evidências cumulativas sobre a influência de legados históricos e capacidade organizacional para gerenciar o passado. Continuando com a perspectiva crítica que desafia o domínio das epistemologias anglo-saxônicas nos estudos de gestão e organização, realizamos um estudo empírico sobre uma companhia aérea multinacional cujos sucessos passados dependiam das fronteiras norte/sul anglo-latino-americanas. Analisamos as grandes narrativas da Pan American Airways (PAA) a partir dos arquivos corporativos da empresa a fim de determinar quais os discursos dominantes acer…

Gendering multi-voiced histories of the North American space industry: the GMRD White women

2019

Purpose The authors focus on “writing women into ‘history’” in this study, embracing the notion of cisgender and ethnicity in relation to the “historic turn”. As such, the authors bring forward the stories of the US Pan American Airway’s Guided Missile Range Division (GMRD) and the White women who worked there. The authors ask what has a Cold War US missile division to tell us about present and future gendered relationships in the North American space industry. Design/methodology/approach The authors apply Foucault’s technology of lamination, a form of critical discourse analysis, to both narrative texts and photographic images in the GMRD’s in-house newsletter, the Clipper, dating from 19…

Historic constructions of the early multinational: on power, politics and culture in Pan Am narratives

2018

This paper examines how Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) - an early incarnation of a multinational enterprise (MNE) - developed its image as an international company. In particular, we examine how the company developed and managed potentially conflicting narratives, including the modernising US company and the airline of 'the Americas' (specifically South America); the carrier of US national interests and the politically neutral actor serving to unify cultures; the purveyor of exotic experiences and the pioneer of modernism. Through a focus on organisational narratives, we reveal the powerful influence of such story telling (through design and serendipity) on images of the peoples and co…

CORPORATE STORYTELLING AND THE IDEA OF LATIN AMERICA

2021

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is contributing to a great variety of theoretical perspectives and empirical settings to generate cumulative evidence about the influence of historical legacies and organisational ability for managing the past. In a continuation of critical perspectives that challenges the dominance of Anglo-Saxon onto-epistemologies in management and organisation studies (MOS), we conducted an empirical study on a multinational airline company whose past successes depended on the North/South, Anglo/Latin American borderlands. We analysed the grand narratives of Pan American Airways' (PAA) corporate archival material to determine its dominant discourses about people from Lat…

Corporate storytelling and the idea of Latin America

2021

The aim of this article is contributing to a great variety of theoretical perspectives and empirical settings to generate cumulative evidence about the influence of historical legacies and organisational ability for managing the past. In a continuation of critical perspectives that challenges the dominance of Anglo-Saxon onto-epistemologies in management and organisation studies (MOS), we conducted an empirical study on a multinational airline company whose past successes depended on the North/South, Anglo/Latin American borderlands. We analysed the grand narratives of Pan American Airways' (PAA) corporate archival material to determine its dominant discourses about people from Latin Americ…

Editorial

2016