Potentials of historical analysis in brazilian organization studies

Abstract

Over the last few years there has been an acute need for constituting organizational research that is directed at local specificities. This also happens in the case of Brazil, where there is seen to be a distance between the national context and that of the countries from which the management technology that is applied here is imported. One of the ways of checking the particular aspects of Brazilian management and organization is by the historical analysis of these models. This text, therefore, deals with the epistemological and methodological aspects that allow us to observe the limits and possibilities of historical research in the field of Organizational Studies, with a particular emphasis on those undertaken in Brazil. Our analysis has been constructed in three sections; the first deals with the assumptions that surround the approximation between the historical perspective and the social sciences; the second deals with historiographic issues that are directly related to the field of Organizational Studies; and the third deals with some of the contributions that Brazilian historiography have made to Organizational Studies. Finally, we present some of the themes for a research agenda.