9. Historical Methods and the Study of How Organizations Manage the Future

This chapter makes the case for the use of historical methods as a way of examining how organizations manage the future. Historical methods correspond to the study of the past through an analysis of historical documentation. This chapter offers an overview of the ontology of time and temporality and the epistemology of historical methods to explain how a focus on the past can help us to study how historical actors made sense of possible futures, how they enacted the(ir) future and how they organized for the future. It also covers some of the challenges of using historical documentation and presents principles that should be used when drawing on this type of evidence to study how organizations manage the future.