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Purpose – This chapter is intended to help strategy scholars evaluate when, why, and how to employ historical research methods in strategy research.

Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on theory and practice of historical research as well as on key examples from the history and strategy literatures, we develop a typology of research approaches to highlight the areas of potential complementarity between historical methods and “traditional” empirical methods in strategy. We then provide annotated examples of historical strategy research to highlight the benefits of this approach and to demonstrate how to make research-related decisions when employing such methods.

Findings – The chapter provides a step-by-step conceptual roadmap for conducting historical strategy research, primarily using an analytic narratives approach.

Originality/value – The chapter fulfills an explicit need for strategy scholars on the boundary of history. We anticipate that it will be a useful reference for those who are considering the use of history in their strategy research.

This chapter examines the integration of leadership topics into an accounting ethics course. Literature review, course review, student feedback. Both practitioners and educators have called for broader education of accounting students in general, and student learning of leadership and interpersonal skills in particular, to prepare students who are entering the profession. I have used the leadership topics and activities discussed in this chapter in a stand-alone ethics course in a graduate business program, but they could also be integrated into an undergraduate course. I provide details regarding course content and delivery, including a weekly schedule of accounting ethics and leadership readings, short cases, and leadership/ethics case research topics. Many of the leadership and ethics subjects in the course are expected to be addressed in the accounting workplace – exploring these topics helps better prepare students to confront future challenges. Although both practitioners and educators have called for broader education of accounting students in general, and student learning of leadership and interpersonal skills in particular, little progress has been made in this area. This chapter contributes to this area by highlighting the value of integrating leadership topics into an accounting ethics course.

The Jason Bourne series of films (2002–2016) are widely acknowledged with helping to successfully re-invent the action thriller genre in the 2000s by focusing more on motivation and plot than over-the-top spectacle. Featuring a profoundly wounded son figure in the titular character, the films are indicative of an awareness of the vulnerabilities and reactions of a fatherless masculinity within a post-Cold War political reality.

This chapter will argue that Bourne's onscreen pain and subsequent violent responses to his various narrative predicaments are a result of being repeatedly betrayed by a series of older males, in many cases, father surrogates. Bourne's experience of this paternal disruption and betrayal is the key psychological motivating factor, with the films and the story arc of the character only being resolved when both he and the audience finally discover and reconcile the role that his biological father played in shaping his destiny and his life. This ‘father hunger’ – in effect a need for a continuative masculinity – that Jason Bourne experiences, and that is arguably at the heart of the franchise, will be analysed and explored within the contexts of post-Jungian screen theory. Alongside the deliberately casting of ‘quality’ actors (such as Brian Cox, Joan Allen, Tommy Lee Jones, David Strathairn) and other formalist elements of the text, archetypal energies and symbolism are also rife throughout the film, and can be, in part, credited with the critical and commercial success of the films. Finally, the films are put in their cinematic context in terms of the influence they subsequently exerted on other action film franchises – particularly James Bond (1962 to present).

Dahms (2008, pp. 43–45) distinguishes Critical Theory from “Critical Liberalism, Cultural Pessimism, and Public Sociology”. He means, first and foremost, to underscore the political gulf that has opened between the original Frankfurt School thinkers and their most celebrated second and third generation heirs, Habermas and Alex Honneth. The latter's affirmative theoretical embrace of progress and cautious optimism render them constitutionally incapable of understanding their putative subject matter, modernity, and thus also of articulating a radical politics sufficient to provide orientation to the specific – the specifically totalizing and lethal – spatio-temporal challenges that confront humanity at the end of modern society. Having barred themselves from fully considering their own participation in a contradictory and deadly system, Habermas’ and Honneth's a priori ideological commitments render them unable to “face facts,” as Dahms (2008, p. 44) stresses, and thus unable to execute a discerning, or even a useful, critical social science. Unwilling to practice Marx's dictum that critique must be followed to its logical conclusion and without regard to opposition from the powers that be, Habermas and Honneth's otherwise very considerable erudition thus fails Critical Theory's original and still most essential litmus test.

Concepts such as “the social,” “sociality,” and even “society,” must be viewed “in time and space,” simultaneously as malleable, as representing national and regional differences, and as reflective of concrete sociohistorical conditions. Importantly, particular societal and historical circumstances exert specific kinds of gravity on efforts to clarify the meaning of the above concepts in general and for specific contexts, and to deploy them for purposes of both illuminating and examining the social phenomena they refer to, and their concrete content and form. It is also necessary to establish how and to what extent such efforts themselves are bound to be symptomatic and expressive of the distinctive features (social, political, cultural, economic, geographic, climatic, etc.) they are intended to illuminate and examine. In the United States, related challenges are especially pronounced, for a range of reasons, including the fact that as a comparably “young” nation that was created under very unique conditions, the character of “the social” and the historical foundations of sociality are discernibly different from other societies on Earth. For this reason, as far as social theory is concerned, before it is possible to assess the status and character of “the social,” of “sociality,” and of “society,” in general and abstract terms, it is important to circumscribe what is unique or “exceptional” about a particular society in whose context the status and nature of “social” is being assessed and characterized. Against the neoliberal trend of pitting the social sciences and humanities against each other, and the natural and engineering sciences against both, the former must learn to collaborate and complement each other in ways that secure the independence and autonomy of the social dimension of increasingly complex and contradictory, yet seemingly cohesive societal reference frames.