Celebrating Success: Professor Charles Harvey

Congratulations to Prof Charles Harvey and his co-authors Prof Mairi Maclean (University of Bath) and Prof Roy Suddaby (University of Victoria) who are this year’s winners of the John F. Mee Award for the paper with the best management history division contribution to the Academy. The Award is for their paper entitled “Multi-Temporality and the Ghostly: Capturing the Spirit of Time Past and Yet to Come”.

Abstract
Despite growing scholarly interest in time, history, and memory, we lack an understanding of the multi-temporal reality of organizations – how past, present, and future intersect to inform the lived experience of organizing. The lexicon of the ghostly can help in this regard. We offer a framework that focuses on core moments of organizational life: foundation, strategic change, and longevity commemoration, and illustrate this using a historical case study of consumer goods multinational Procter & Gamble (1930-2010). We extend explorations of the ghostly into the domain of long-lived multinationals. Departed leaders highlight the capacity for temporal interplay, representing a ‘shorthand’ for members to understand the organization’s past, present, and future. It is their persistence and mutability that makes them ghostly, reaffirming the past yet remaining open to re-interpretation. Studying organizations through the lens of the ghostly turns the spotlight on the spiritual, highlighting the need for re-enchanting our theorizing of organizing.

This year’s AOM conference, the 82nd meeting, is to be held in Seattle between 5th and 9th August.