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Introduction 

In October 2023, Professor David Teece gave the plenary talk at the Strategic Management Society meeting in Toronto (Canada), in which he called management scholars to re-think the way they had conducted research for decades. Professor Teece’s argued that the political, social and economic uncertainties existing in the world created by the rise of ethno-nationalism, inequality, protectionism, and populism made the way scholars analyzed the operations/strategies of firms obsolete. In his talk, Professor Teece posited that the field of management was falling behind reality with its focus on firm-level decisions in which the wider context was limited to a series of quantitative economic information or quantified political data.  As a potential solution, Professor Teece advocated for research that took into consideration how corporations shaped the political environment, what the role of social conflict was in the strategic decisions by firms, and how the historical legacy affected the political and economic environment under which firms operated.  Ignoring these factors, Teece warned us, would lead to research with limited relevance to the real world.

Teece’s is not the only voice of an influential management scholar calling for a re-consideration of how research is conducted.  International business scholars Jean Boddewyn, Mark Casson, and Peter Buckley expressed a similar concern in different reviews of the literature (Boddewyn, 2016; Buckley and Casson, 2021), in which they advocate for more historically informed research in the light of the rise of inequality, populism, nationalism, and hostility against globalization. These scholars and others point out that historical research does not simply consist of looking at phenomena for a long period of time, studying events that took place in the past, or using archival sources but also requires the adoption of methods developed by historians on how to analyze the interaction between the evolution of the wider political and social context and firms’ decisions (Argyres, et al., 2020; Welch, et al., 2022). Several studies have shown the benefits of historical research at advancing management theory (e.g. Bucheli and DeBerge, 2024; Bucheli, Ciravegna, & Sáenz, 2023; Lubinski and Wadhwani, 2020), while others have “translated” the methods developed by historians to the management academic community so that the context is properly integrated into the analysis of firm decisions and archival sources are critically analyzed (e.g. Argyres, et al., 2020; Buckley, 2021; Kipping, et al., 2014).  In this way, historically informed research has gained legitimacy in management scholarship (references), opening the opportunities to its advancement in management research in Ibero-America.

The field of business history is not alien in Ibero-American academia.  For several decades, a large number of scholars have conducted research that implicitly or explicitly falls within the definition of “business history.”   However, for a long time most of those scholars worked in history departments and their research questions fell within the debates of Latin American historiography. This means, despite of the high quality of many of those studies, their authors did not engage in dialogue with management scholars.  Since the early 2000s, however, a new generation of business historians working at business schools in Latin America, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States started producing new research that was informed by management theory and aimed to contribute to management scholarship. As a result, some of their studies were published in mainstream management journals or as teaching cases for MBA courses (e.g. Lluch and Salvaj, 2014; Bucheli and Salvaj, 2018; Bucheli, Ciravegna, & Sáenz, 2023; Moschieri & Fernández-Moya, 2022).   

The current global environment characterized by political and economic uncertainties has led influential management scholars to call for more historically informed research to better understand how firms operate in a changing political and social context.  

This special issue responds to this call in two ways. First, by showing the benefits of historical research methods to study how firms operate in the traditionally unstable Ibero-American environment. And second, by showing how historically informed research of firms operating in Ibero-America can provide valuable empirical information for scholars to re-think or extend widely accepted theoretical approaches that assume a stable and predictable world that no longer exists. With this aim in mind, the special issue combines empirical and perspective articles by scholars trained in management and history.    

List of topic areas

• Business History, 
• International Business, 
• Management, 
• Strategy, 
• Organizational Theory, 
• Ibero America

Guest Editors

Marcelo Bucheli, 
Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, 
[email protected]  

Erica Salvaj, 
School of Business and Economics, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile, 
[email protected]

Submissions Information

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Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. 
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 1 September 2024
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 17 February 2025