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Counterfactual history, managementand organizations: Reflections andnew directionsGiuliano Maielli a & Charles Booth ba Queen Mary, University of Londonb University of the West of EnglandPublished online: 02 Jan 2013.

To cite this article: Giuliano Maielli & Charles Booth (2008) Counterfactual history, managementand organizations: Reflections and new directions, Management & Organizational History, 3:1,49-61

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MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY Vol 3(1): 49–61DOI: 10.1177/1744935908090997Copyright ©2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)http://moh.sagepub.com

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Counterfactual history, management andorganizations: Reflections and newdirectionsGiuliano Maielli Queen Mary, University of London

Charles Booth University of the West of England

AbstractThis article reflects on the papers published in the Symposium on ‘Counterfactual

History in Management and Organizations’. After describing the background to the

symposium we review some important themes in the multidisciplinary domain of

counterfactuals. We discuss each of the papers published in the symposium and set

out our views on future directions for counterfactual history in the management and

organization studies discipline.

Key words • counterfactuals • future research • history • management and organization

studies

Introduction

This article is a commentary on the papers published in this and in the previous issueof Management & Organizational History in the ‘Symposium on Counterfactual Historyin Management and Organizations’. In this short introduction we present the back-ground to the symposium and discuss the structure of the paper. In the next section,we provide a (necessarily brief and partial) overview of some key themes, issues anddebates in the burgeoning multidisciplinary literature on counterfactuals and relatedconcepts, approaches and processes. We then reflect on the contributions of the paperspublished in the symposium, before concluding by indicating some future directionsfor research in, and on, counterfactual history in management and organization theory.

The recently completed research project on ‘Corporate History, Narrative, andBusiness Knowledge’, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK)under the Evolution of Business Knowledge (EBK) programme, included as one of itsthree strands a focus on ‘Counterfactual Narratives’. As part of this strand, the projectteam arranged a workshop on ‘Counterfactual History in Management andOrganizations’ at the University of Warwick on 15th-16th December 2005. Thirteen

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papers were presented at the workshop, of which six were developed for publicationin this symposium. In addition, the symposium includes one paper (by Elaine Wong,published in Part One of the symposium, last issue) which was not presented at theworkshop but was developed separately.

The full list of papers presented at the Warwick workshop is shown in Table 1. Fora number of reasons it was not possible to include all of the papers in this symposium.We, and the EBK project team, are deeply grateful to all presenters and attendees at theworkshop (and especially to Paul Duguid and Phil Scranton, who acted as discussants).

Counterfactuals in Multiple Disciplines

The literature on counterfactuals and related topics is a broad, multi-disciplinary,burgeoning endeavour. These topics have sustained serious and prolonged attention infields as diverse as philosophy, historiography, social psychology and political science(for example, respectively, Lewis 1973; Ferguson 1997b; Roese and Olson 1995;Tetlock and Belkin 1996b). These disciplines have distinct, though sometimes over-lapping (in the cases of historiography and political science) concerns and interests in

Table 1 The Warwick Workshop

Author(s) Title

Charles Booth Modal Narratives and Possible WorldsPhil Scranton Technology, Science and American InnovationKeith Hoskin What if Management had been Invented in Europe?Giuliano Maielli Counterfactuals, Superfactuals and the Problematic Relationship

between Business Management and the Past *Erika Henik and Theory- vs. Imagination-Driven Thinking about Historical Phil Tetlock Counterfactuals: Differences between Management Scholars

and Political Scientists *Brad MacKay Virtual Knowledge: The Role of Counterfactual Reasoning in

Management and Organizational Thought *Mads Mordhorst From Counterfactual to Counter-Narrative History *John Wilson Ferranti, 1975–93: What could have beenSteve Toms Surviving Globalization: Alternative Histories of the Lancashire

and British Textile Industries *Charles Booth Multiple Ontologies and Counterfactual Histories: The Cases of

the Moog SynthesizerBill Cooke and The Right to be Human and Human Rights: Maslow, HUAC, and Albert Mills the Death of Humanist Theories of Management *Scott Taylor and The University that Wasn’t: A Counterfactual Framing of Emma Bell NHSU (2001–2005)Peter Clark The Counterfactual Spectrum and the Evolution of Business

School Knowledge

* Developed paper subsequently published in this Management & Organizational History symposium.

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the topics. Philosophers have concerned themselves with, for example, the truthclaims of counterfactual statements: more broadly, with ways the world is and how itmight be. Psychologists have evinced considerable interest in the role of counterfac-tuals in attributional thinking (of causation, blame, responsibility, and so on), judge-ment and decision making (effects on future choices, for example), and in thecognitive-emotive interface (regret, disappointment, guilt, etc). Historiographers andpolitical scientists use counterfactuals, inter alia, as an aid to exploring causation. Bysubtracting or substituting causes from historical political events and processes, thehistorian is thus able to judge their significance and those of their effects; or rather,counterfactuals allow us to make judgements both about the proper identification ofcauses and conditions, and about their significance (Booth 2003, 100).

It is not our intention here to rehearse the fundamental debates which have beeninitiated by the landmark texts referred to above, or to reproduce their defences ofcounterfactual approaches in detail. These debates and defences are not only discussedin considerable detail in the texts themselves, but have also received considerableattention in the symposium as well, most notably in the MacKay, Maielli and Henikand Tetlock contributions. Rather, we focus on a more limited range of issues in out-lining the potential application of these ideas to management and organizational stud-ies. In so doing, we take as a starting text Hellekson’s (2000, 254–5) characterizationof the ‘alternate history’ (a genre of fictional counterfactuals):

The alternate history as a genre speculates about such topics as the nature oftime and linearity, the past’s link to the present, the present’s link to the future,and the role of individuals in the history making process. Alternate historiesquestion the nature of history and causality; they question accepted notions oftime and space; they rupture linear movement … and they foreground the‘constructedness’ of history and the role narrative plays in this construction.

Of the five uses of counterfactuals discussed by Tetlock and Belkin (1996b)1 this is relatedto, but broader in scope than, the approach to counterfactuals implied by the mental sim-ulation of possible counterfactual worlds which ‘reveal … double standards in … judge-ment, contradictory causal beliefs, and the influence of unwanted biases such as certaintyof hindsight’ (Tetlock and Belkin 1996b, 13). A number of papers in the symposiumadvance a weaker (Maielli, Mackay, Henik and Tetlock) or stronger (Mordhorst, Cooke andMills) version of this perspective on counterfactuals and related concepts as heuristic tools.

Whilst we would not argue that this approach is necessarily more valuable, stimu-lating or robust than other styles of counterfactual argument, or would wish to limit coun-terfactual analysis to heuristic approaches, adopting such a focus carries with it a numberof benefits. First, it enables counterfactualists to evade, or at least to sidestep, some of themore inimical critiques of their endeavours. Tetlock and Parker (2006) list three suchlines of attack: that counterfactual history is hopelessly arbitrary, that it is hopelessly spec-ulative, and that it is hopelessly self-serving. All three are weakened or fall if a heuristicapproach is adopted. Arbitrariness and speculation become, if not virtues, then at leastnot recognizably fatal weaknesses, if the aim is to sensitize analysts and other agents to

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contingency, to disrupt assumptions and unquestioned dominant logics, thought-worlds,and so on. Similarly, if the aim is to disturb, invert or generally weaken the taken-for-granted, this cannot in any conventional way be characterized as self-serving in the senseadvanced by critics. This approach also qualifies the force of critiques such as that ofMordhorst (this issue) who is skeptical about the more traditional idiographic counter-factual methodology of Ferguson (1997a), for example, but whose own preferred counter-narrative approach is itself grounded in explicit commitments towards anti-determinism,anti-linearity, and the disruption of canonical accounts. Finally, placing heuristicapproaches at the centre of the counterfactual endeavour represents an opportunity for thekind of interdisciplinary engagement, between historians and social psychologists forexample, which underpins many of the papers in the symposium. This is achieved, inprinciple, by the heuristician’s commitment to the generation and negotiation of action-able knowledge, whether among academic or practitioner communities.

To pursue this argument is not by any means to deny the usefulness or the needfor counterfactual research, either theoretical or empirical, in the other traditions dis-cussed by Tetlock and Belkin (1996b). In summary, the advantages of such research,as identified by Tetlock and Belkin (1996b) include, on the one hand, a contingent,particularistic and anti-determinist perspective on historical events which resists uni-versalistic teleological temptation and which questions or qualifies naïve accounts ofhistorical progress; in contrast and on the other hand, if employed nomothetically,counterfactuals may serve to reveal universalistic structures and tendencies which wereobscure to temporally localized historical agents or within particularistic historicalaccounts. In seeking, potentially, to expose and in some senses to resolve, creatively,this tension between idiographic and nomothetic approaches, counterfactuals thusadmit the possibility of a rapprochement between theory and history.

The call for papers for the Warwick workshop and for the symposium explicitlyacknowledged the need for empirically grounded examples of counterfactual accounts asapplied to business and management. Even taking the various examples presented at theworkshop or published in the symposium into account, there remains a singular dearthof such examples, and it should be taken as read that we consider that such researchwould significantly strengthen the profile of counterfactual thinking in our discipline.These examples would, in principle, be potentially vulnerable to the critiques men-tioned above, amongst others, and would therefore need to adopt the methodologicalprinciples (or countermeasures) discussed by Tetlock and Belkin (1996b), Tetlock andParker (2006), and others. Fortunately, such sources provide robust and enduring pro-cedural precepts for scholars to craft counterfactual narratives which are capable of with-standing many or most of the critiques advanced by sceptics.

Reflections on the Papers

In this section of the article we comment upon what we see as the contributions of thepapers presented in the symposium, both severally and jointly. We commence with some

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general remarks before considering the papers in turn. The symposium on ‘CounterfactualHistory in Management and Organizations’ consists of two parts: Part One, published asVolume 2, Issue 4 of this journal, includes five papers: from Maielli, MacKay, Toms andBeck, Henik and Tetlock, and Wong. Part Two (this issue) includes articles fromMordhorst and Cooke and Mills, as well as this commentary. The issues bring togetherempirical and theoretical contributions to the counterfactual literature, combining differ-ent approaches from economic, business and organizational history, social psychology,organizational sociology and business management.

Despite such a variety, the articles share, either implicitly or explicitly, a number of commonalities. To start with, all contributions stress the heuristic and analytical valueof counterfactuals, though some contributors are more sceptical than others (seeMordhorst, this issue, and Toms and Beck, last issue). Henik and Tetlock, MacKay, andToms and Beck emphasize that counterfactuals expose the outcomes of historical, polit-ical and organizational processes as things that are neither necessary nor unavoidable.Maielli focuses on the relationship between counterfactual analysis, scenario design andstrategic decision-making. Wong analyses the impact of counterfactual communication,be it implicit or explicit, on the performance of employees. Mordhorst and Cooke andMills show how counterfactuals bring contingency back into historical analysis.

Furthermore, the majority of contributions refer either implicitly or explicitly(Henik and Tetlock; Cooke and Mills) to the falsification of outcomes as the means bywhich counterfactuals enable researchers to analyse policy, events and actions withoutbeing ‘contaminated’ by hindsight. In the case of historical analysis, the ‘immuniza-tion’ of the researcher against the knowledge of the outcome would bring historianscloser to the perspective of the actors who were actually involved in the historicalprocess and, therefore, did not possess any knowledge of the outcome of the processesof change they were experiencing. This is a central point in Ferguson’s (1997a)approach to historical counterfactual analysis.

Similarly, it seems conceivable that business, economic and political actors wouldalso benefit from the falsification of outcomes and decontamination of analyticalprocesses from outcome knowledge, as induced by counterfactuals (Henik andTetlock; MacKay). Counterfactuals might well enable decision-makers to ‘think out-side the box’, and to evaluate a multiplicity of possible outcomes. Crucially, it is inthis respect, that the link between counterfactual logic and scenario-making emergesas a key element connecting past, present and future.

Related to this point, a theme that emerges either implicitly or explicitly from someof the papers is the link between the design and use of counterfactuals and the analysis ofpath dependence and structural repertoires (Maielli, MacKay, Toms and Beck). This themeis complementary to that of outcome falsification and the immunization against outcomeknowledge and indeed is connected with the issue of scenario making. If counterfactualsaddress the question of possibilities and constraints in the past and the present, as well ashelping to identify possible scenarios for future cycles of structuration and co-evolution(Clark et al. 2006), then the analysis of the evolution of repertoires of routines and behav-iours is relevant to the delimitation of the boundaries of credible counterfactuals.

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Furthermore, social reproduction of knowledge and routines is likely to affect anactor’s perception of what can and cannot be changed in a specific scenario. In thiscontext, the historical consciousness of evolutionary outcomes becomes in itself animportant determinant of scenario-making. Indeed, within organizational psychologythe awareness of actors about how people construct counterfactuals to explain opera-tional success or failure is regarded as a key element in enhancing the performance ofhuman capital (Wong). Nonetheless, a firm’s awareness of the implicit and explicitmechanisms by which organizations design their scenarios and construct counterfac-tuals brings counterfactuals in history and organizations right into the core of strate-gic decision-making and policy-making.

Shifting the focus upon each individual contribution, Maielli analyses the relation-ship between a firm’s historical consciousness of evolutionary outcome, the developmentof structural repertoires (Clark, 2000) the nature of time flow, and the way organizationsmight use counterfactuals and superfactuals to construct scenarios. A distinction is madebetween history as analysis of the past and history as a hidden or ‘under cover’ agent ofstrategic decision-making, whereby the historical process of knowledge accumulationand routine development affects the way organizations perceive internal strengths andweaknesses and external threats and opportunities, and how firms model their future andplan changes to their cultural repertoires. Attention is paid to the distinction betweencounterfactuals, which investigate what would happen if one or more variables changedwithin a given organization and its environment, and superfactuals enabling the analy-sis of the constraints that would prevent the ‘What if’ from unfolding. Since those con-straints are generated by the evolution of structural repertoires, firms without historicalconsciousness of evolutionary outcomes would only be able to design poor counterfactu-als while being altogether unable to design superfactuals. Finally, counterfactuals andsuperfactuals are developed to re-evaluate output-mix optimization at Fiat between1970 and 2000 and to hypothesize possible scenarios for the 2000s.

While Maielli tries to formulate a specific way to use counterfactuals and superfac-tuals in strategic decision-making, MacKay investigates the debates and discusses theprospects of using counterfactual history in business management by revising the estab-lished arguments against the use of virtual history within business organizations. First,MacKay addresses the implications of those arguments in management and organizationtheory. Then, he moves on to analysing a range of perspectives and criteria that shouldbe considered when writing scholarly rigorous counterfactual history. Emphasis is givento the logical links that would make a counterfactual credible. The MacKay and Maiellicontributions feature some complementarities, with particular reference to counterfac-tuals as tools for analysing path dependence, and to superfactuals as diagnostic tools forassessing assumptions concerning context and structural repertoires. MacKay’s contri-bution is rich in references to established case studies in counterfactual literature.

The Toms and Beck contribution also revolves around an established case study ineconomic history. This is the Lancashire textile industry, which has been at the centre ofa number of counterfactuals aiming to expose the inadequacy of industrial policy in theBritish cotton industry in the first half of the 20th century. Toms and Beck show that

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the established counterfactuals on the Lancashire cotton industry all suffer from theproblems of teleology and hindsight that occur when the counterfactual is contaminatedby ex post knowledge of the outcome. This problem might well occur in counterfactualsbased on the economic analysis of opportunity costs, such as the famous Fogel (1964)cliometric study of the American Railroads, which implies that the economic actors atthe time were aware ex ante of those opportunity costs. After offering a critique of theestablished counterfactuals on the Lancashire cotton industry, Toms and Beck offer aconvincing counter-narrative based on genealogical and path-dependent interpretationof the events that led to the collapse of the Lancashire cotton industry after World War I.In doing so, Toms and Beck restrict ex ante the scope of manoeuvre for cotton entrepre-neurs in the 1920s hence underlining that the evolution of the Lancashire entrepreneursshould be considered rational once our hindsight is removed from our judgement. Tomsand Beck see the analysis of evolutionary patterns as an antidote to the bias of outcomeknowledge. In fact, they analyse evolutionary processes of knowledge accumulation todisprove counterfactuals based on an economic rationale that is based on the ex postknowledge of economic outcomes. Those counterfactuals disclose alternative possiblechoices that appear to be rational ex post, but might have been well outside the analyti-cal horizon of the economic actors operating at the time when the Lancashire cottonindustry declined. In this sense, Toms and Beck use evolutionalism in a way similar tothat of Maielli’s investigation of the Fiat case, where the analysis of evolutionary patternsdiscloses the constraints that Fiat managers would have considered before taking deci-sions, had they had historical consciousness of evolutionary patterns. Such consciousnessappears to be necessary to evaluate opportunities and constraints in breaking pathdependence. In this sense, the historical consciousness of evolutionary patterns shouldprotect managers from path-dependent determinism as well as from the temptation toimitate competitors’ innovative patterns that might not be compatible with incumbentstructural repertoires within and outside the organization.

Similarly, the Toms and Beck assessment of the established counterfactual histo-ries on the Lancashire cotton industry reveals a restricted strategic scope of manoeu-vre for decision makers before and after World War I. In fact, business actors were notin the position to single out and select the policy options highlighted ex post by eco-nomic historians through their counterfactual narratives.

Toms and Beck identify three types of established counterfactuals: the Lazonickcounterfactual emphasizing issues of industry structure, the Keynesian counterfactualemphasizing issues of efficiency, and the Neo-classical economics counterfactualemphasizing issues of industry life-cycle and industrial policy. Toms and Beck seem toimply that all those counterfactuals are biased by the implicit ideology ingrained in thedisciplinary approaches taken by neo-classical economists, as opposed to Keynesianeconomists and business historians. Lazonick’s counterfactual concerns issues of verti-cal integration as they are central to the comparison between the US and the UK, fol-lowing the Chandlerian analysis of the dynamics of industrial capitalism. Similarly theKeynesian and Neo-classic counterfactuals insist on issues of industry efficiency andstructural change as central to their respective approaches.

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The issue of ideological bias in counterfactual analysis is explicitly analysed byHenik and Tetlock in their comparative analysis of the use of counterfactuals in vari-ous disciplines. In fact, they find that counterfactuals in business history and businessmanagement tend to be less ideologically polarized than those developed in politicalhistory, as these fields assume that technological advances and diffusion of usefulknowledge cannot be delayed for long, and that economic actors tend to operate asquasi-rational actors. In this context, the use of counterfactuals in business manage-ment is seen as heuristically important as it would protect decision-makers from hind-sight bias and from the perception that past outcomes were unavoidable. As alreadynoted, this is an important point when it comes to analysing the relationship betweencounterfactual analysis and scenario-making. Henik and Tetlock do not push theirargument directly into the issue of strategic decision-making. However, they predictthat in the face of an increasing use of counterfactual logics in business management,counterfactuals in business history will become more and more politicized as has hap-pened in political and social history. Should this expectation unfold, it would haveramifications for how counterfactuals are used to support strategic decision-making,so the Henik and Tetlock research agenda presents an interesting opportunity for fur-ther developments in both business history and business management.

The issue of the ‘politicization’ of counterfactuals is also implicit in Mordhorst’scontribution, where the focus shifts from counterfactuals to counter-narratives. Theauthor stresses that counterfactuals are important as they serve to put contingencyback into history, and serve as an antidote to the determinism of traditional businesshistory. However, one of the contingencies that could affect further historical devel-opments can indeed be found in the reproduction of events in the form of a narrative.Indeed, this is not a new approach in historiography and certainly represents a typi-cal way of thinking for example in postmodernist approaches. Of course, we know thatour knowledge about Hannibal is influenced by Tito Livio’s account of the PunicWars. We also know that different accounts of the Punic Wars would hardly havechanged the outcome of either Cannae or Zama battles. However, Mordhorst’s ques-tion is about how certain kinds of narratives acquire the status of official accountswhile some others do not. This is key to the issue of knowledge reproduction. Thus,while Mordhorst’s article is written mainly to contribute to the historical literature oncounterfactuals, his investigation of the processes of the reproduction of events in theform of narratives and counter-narratives is obviously highly relevant to organizationtheory and to the analysis of business cases. Maielli’s article, for example, implies thatthe ability of different occupational blocks within Fiat to impose their counterfactu-als and counter-narratives played a critical role in determining output-mix strategies.

The same set of issues emerges in a more direct way from Wong’s article. Thisaddresses specific issues of performance by looking at how counterfactual argumentsare used and could be used to make employees more willing to cooperate, particu-larly when it comes to analysing and solving problems. In this article, history is com-pressed into the recent past and present of business organizations. Nonetheless, it isinteresting to see how the consciousness of firms of how employees produce and use

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counterfactual communication could improve performance. This represents a field offuture research where business historians, organizational historians and organizationalpsychologists could seemingly cooperate. Certainly, the analysis of the impact of coun-terfactual communication on the efficiency of a firm’s human capital poses questionsof ideological bias as emphasized by Henik and Tetlock.

Finally, the Cooke and Mills article on Maslow develops a series of counterfactualsto investigate what would have happened within management studies had Maslow beenput on the stand by the McCarthyite inquisition. The authors hint that Maslow mighthave abandoned the modernization model and the humanism underpinning it, had hebeen put on the stand. The article is certainly provocative and, at the same time, explica-tive of a number of key issues in counterfactualism. The relationship between events andhow societies accumulate knowledge is analysed by looking at how societies could havedeveloped alternative knowledge, had certain events unfolded. The case study and thecounterfactual proposed have indeed important relevance for management and organi-zational knowledge and indeed for our understanding of American hegemony. Outsidethe scope of the article remains the question of how students and scholars would haveread Maslow had he stood trial. This is a central question for phenomena of reproduc-tion and diffusion of knowledge and repertoires. Indeed, counterfactuals and structuralrepertoires analysis are intimately connected.

Ways Forward

In this section of the paper we indicate some possible future directions for scholarlyenquiry and research on counterfactuals in our discipline. We hope that this sympo-sium and the increasing diffusion of landmark treatments such as those of Roese andOlson (1995), Tetlock and Belkin (1996b) Ferguson (1997a) and, most recently Tetlocket al. (2006) will obviate the need for further fundamental programmatic explorationsof the importance of counterfactual approaches in history and the social sciences.Instead, we propose a future research agenda which is more fine-grained in detail,opening up a range of meso and micro issues for examination. We discuss some ofthese possibilities below, including, primarily, the scope for interdisciplinary rap-prochement and synergy represented by this flowering of interest in counterfactualand related approaches. We also consider that the usefulness of counterfactual andother approaches to modality need not, indeed should not, be focused solely on issuesof historical interest, but also possess particular relevance to the analysis of present andfuture organizational behaviour, broadly construed. Furthermore, we emphasize thelikely usefulness of counterfactual and superfactual analysis to heuristic as well as ana-lytical applications, both in organizational and in academic domains.

The epistemological foundations of management studies lie in a range of disci-plines such as economics, sociology, business and organizational history, and philoso-phy, each differing from the others in the scope and aims of its teaching and researchagendas, as well as in the pool and combination of theoretical and empirical (including

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qualitative and quantitative) tools utilized by researchers in each specific field ofenquiry. The theoretical and empirical richness of management studies creates theopportunity to analyse organizations from different perspectives and pursue inter-dis-ciplinary synergy. At the same time it poses the challenge of combining different the-oretical and empirical approaches within a coherent epistemological framework.

While recognizing the complexity of this challenge, this symposium tries toexploit the opportunity to bridge business and organization history with organiza-tional theory and organizational psychology, and to identify common grounds ofresearch and methodologies available for the analysis of organizations past, present andfuture. Therefore, the symposium aims to contribute to the aforementioned disci-plines as well as to the broad research on scenarios and organizational foresight. In thiscontext counterfactuals and superfactuals not only represent tools widely utilized inmany of the disciplines underpinning management studies but also, and more impor-tantly, they might provide the coherent framework in which the synergy between thevarious disciplines underpinning management studies could come to fruition. Thissymposium can be seen as a step in that direction. Counterfactuals and superfactualsaddress modal questions of possibility, necessity and probability in the past, presentand future of an organization and are intimately connected with the design of scenar-ios concerning an organization’s future. Around the use of counterfactual and super-factual history in management and organizations this symposium identifies a numberof interdisciplinary fields for further research.

The first revolves around the concept of ‘history undercover’, where the analysisof the development of routines-driven path dependence and structural repertoireshelps to develop counterfactuals and superfactuals as part of scenario-making exer-cises. Indeed, the use of counterfactual and superfactual history in conjunction withthe analysis of structural repertoires opens up interesting research possibilities for theanalysis of competition between contexts and the identification of a firm’s strategicscope for manoeuvre. In fact, it enables researchers to identify assumptions and causa-tion relationships on which the design of credible counterfactuals and scenarios shouldbe based. This brings the historical analysis of evolutionary and path-dependent phe-nomena of knowledge accumulation into the core of strategic decision-making.

In this context, Maielli’s analysis of Fiat’s intangible specialization could beexpanded to different structural repertoires, for example comparing different nationalindustries. The implication of Maielli’s research in terms of policy is clear, as the super-factuals and counterfactuals on Fiat imply a clear division of labour within the Europeancar industry between Germany (focusing on the upper segments of the market) and Italyand France (focusing on the lower end of the market). The falsification or validation ofMaielli’s hypothesis seems to represent an interesting field of further research.

Furthermore, the development of the concept of superfactuals as heuristic tools tolimit the strategic scope for manoeuvre represents a relatively recent development inmanagement studies. This again brings history and evolutionalism directly into thecore of strategic decision-making and industrial policy, as superfactuals can provide apowerful diagnostic tool for counterfactuals and scenarios. Following Clark’s (2006)

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superfactual on Rover, the Clark et al. (2007) superfactual on Project Hindsight, andthe Booth et al. (2008) analysis of counterfactuals as modal narratives, more theoreti-cal and empirical research is needed to develop superfactual heuristics and test thevalidity of established counterfactuals as well as future scenarios in various businessenvironments.

The connection between the historical analysis of structural repertoires and thedefinition of assumptions and processes of causation and limitation in counterfac-tuals and scenarios is intimately connected with the development of heuristic anddesigning tools for future scenarios. So is the analysis of counterfactuals as modalnarratives (Booth et al. 2008). The identification of counterfactuals as modal nar-ratives is implicit in some of the contributions to this issue (Maielli, Henik andTetlock, Wong). Moreover, the analysis of counterfactuals as modal narratives iscrucial to the enhancement of the epistemological foundations upon which bothcounterfactual histories and scenario-making should be based. Such analysis repre-sents an emerging field of research where synergies between management and orga-nizational studies, historical research and philosophy can indeed come to fruition,with direct ramifications for the ‘futures literature’ and applications in strategicmanagement and policy-making.

The theoretical research on counterfactuals as modal narrative is also relevant tothe empirical work of Henik and Tetlock. Their contribution to this issue looks atquestions of ideological and disciplinary polarization in the use of counterfactual his-tory. They find that business history counterfactuals are less ideologically polarizedthan counterfactuals in social and political history. However, Henik and Tetlock sug-gest that in the future a progressive politicization of the use of counterfactuals in thebusiness environment might occur. While business historians might be interested inverifying whether this trend already emerged in the past, Henik and Tetlock’s hypoth-esis might open an entirely new field of investigation in organizational studies, aswould the extension of their work to examining managers’, as well as academics’, atti-tudes and predilections towards counterfactual thinking.

Henik and Tetlock’s work is also relevant to Wong’s research on counterfactu-als and performance, which links counterfactuals to issues in organizational psy-chology. Wong’s empirical investigation of the relationship between counterfactualnarrative and the propensity of employees to cooperate towards troubleshooting effi-ciency is stimulating and can be replicated in any field of Management. Also,Wong’s paper highlights the need for historical and organizational disciplines toconverge towards a common research agenda highlighting similarities and differ-ences in the use of counterfactuals for the analysis of the past, present and future.MacKay’s paper is also concerned, in a different way, with developing a rapprochementbetween counterfactuals in history and counterfactuals as employed in psychology,drawing generously on both literatures in advancing his programmatic defence ofcounterfactual approaches to business and management. Hopefully, this symposiumwill help to initiate and stimulate a debate in this particular direction, as well as inthe others indicated.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is part of the research project on ‘Corporate History, Narrative, and BusinessKnowledge’ (RES-334–25–0013), funded by the Economic and Social ResearchCouncil under the Evolution of Business Knowledge programme (http://www.ebkre-search.org/). We are grateful to the other members of the project team (Peter Clark,Agnes Delahaye, Stephen Procter and Michael Rowlinson) for their encouragement andsupport.

Notes

1. The five ‘styles of counterfactual argumentation’ identified by Tetlock and Belkin (1996b, 7–13)are: idiographic, nomothetic theory testing, idiographic-nomothetic synthesis, pure thought exper-iments, and mental simulation of counterfactual worlds. Of these, the last is closest to what we referto as heuristic use of counterfactuals (in a strong sense) or what Booth et al. (2008) have referred toas doxastic-axiological modal narratives; that is, narratives (or thought experiments) which seek toelicit cognitive estrangement from the comforting familiarities of analyst’s doxastic (belief) or axi-ological (value) systems.

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Giuliano Maielli [g.maielli@qmul.ac.uk] explores the relationship between tangible capital accu-mulation, intangible capital formation, and strategic decision-making in large-scale manufacturing. Inparticular, his approach bridges the concept of path dependency and the evolutionary theory of eco-nomic change with the concept of structural repertoires, to investigate how firms develop paths ofintangible specialization and manage innovation. Giuliano has published both empirical and theoret-ical articles on product and process innovation in the car industry and has analysed the relevanceof Business History within Business Studies.

Charles Booth [charles.booth@uwe.ac.uk] is one of the founding editors of Management &Organizational History, and has served as the chair of the Management History Division of theAcademy of Management. His current interests concern (1) the use of counterfactuals and otherforms of modal narrative in history, popular culture and organization studies; and (2) aspects ofsocial and collective memory in organizations, and in society.

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