James March in Irvine: A history of the ahistorical in organisation theory

Abstract

James G. March, one of organisation theory’s most influential scholars, died in September 2018. From 1963 to 1969, he was the founding Dean of UC-Irvine’s School of Social Sciences where he led a unique and influential experiment in organisation, pedagogy and social scientific inquiry. This article gives an account of that experiment and also reflects on March’s memory and legacy. In line with contemporary enthusiasms, March believed that social phenomena could be modelled using sophisticated mathematical techniques, and that this should inform both research and pedagogy. These techniques were necessarily ahistorical. He also celebrated innovation and interdisciplinarity, and so assembled a heterogeneous group, many of whom were not mathematical modellers. In retrospect, the School was an important node in the development of new and influential streams of research, such as situated learning, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Significantly, these approaches were also ahistorical. The experiment provides an important historical setting for understanding how, where, and when these fields emerged and illustrates the contextual nature of knowledge in organisation theory. It also helps explicate how history and theory have come to be differentiated from one another in organisation studies and contextualises attempts to integrate the two domains.