A touch of nostalgia: on Albert O. Hirschman, my idol

Abstract

I am fully aware that M@n@gement is primarily interested in new approaches to management and organization studies. However, as we know, fashion (not least that of science) tends to go in circles. Therefore, it is sometimes useful to go back in order to go forward (more on that topic in Czarniawska, 2010). Watching with some amusement the “positivism light” that seems to be dominating many journals, I believe, for example, that a new methodological revolution, like that of the late 1970s, is in the offing. Therefore, I hope that readers will forgive my sentimental excursion back to the works of an author who has not earned the attention he deserves in management and organization studies. I refer to Albert Otto Hirschman (1915–2012), a German-American social scientist, claimed by many subdisciplines, but truly a scholarly hybrid and, as James G. March noted in this very journal, endowed with a “beautiful imagination” (March, 2013: 736).