Hayden White and His Influence

Abstract

A figure who courted controversy, White’s profound influence on the discipline of management history is acknowledged by friend and foe alike. Like Foucault and Derrida, White made the interrelationship between language and knowledge the key to his unique brand of historiography, declaring that there is always a “fictive character” to “historical reconstruction.” In consequence, “history” was for White “a place of fantasy … all story, no plot, no explanation, no ideological implication at all – that is to say, ‘myth’.” For White, historians do not “record” history. Rather they “do” history, creating a new, imaginary world. In exploring the life and ideas of Hayden White from the time of his entry into Detroit’s Wayne State University in the late 1940s, this chapter observes that although White’s ideas were similar to those of French postmodernists, he came to his conclusions via an independent path. In blurring the lines between history and myth, however, White continually confronted difficulty in debates as to whether historical events such as the Holocaust were “historically” real or simply matters of historical representations.