2026/04/30 by Adam K. Frost, Grietjie Verhoef, Gabrielle Durepos
Arts and Humanities · Business, Management and Accounting · #Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis #Philosophy, History, and Historiography #Management and Organizational Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/00076791.2026.2647792
Business history’s evidentiary conventions were forged in close proximity to the corporate and state archives of Western economies. As the discipline has expanded, these conventions increasingly function as constraints: where formal archives are absent, fragmentary, or inaccessible, they delimit the scope of what can be known. We develop the concept of epistemic repair to name and address this problem. Drawing on six articles spanning Vietnam, China, Morocco, and Turkey, we propose a framework that distinguishes four operations through which scholars are reconstructing what the discipline treats as evidence, how it establishes rigor, and what it asks of the historian. These operations range from recognizing source traditions the discipline has overlooked to producing new evidentiary forms where no record ever existed. The framework has implications beyond business history: any empirical discipline whose methods were built for one set of conditions faces comparable challenges when its ambitions extend beyond them.