At the Intersection of Business History and Organization Theory: An Interdisciplinary and Process-Based Method for Studying Organizational Change

This contribution presents the methodology and the main results of a research program aimed at understanding and explaining the historical development and the trajectories of organizational change in small and medium enterprises belonging to the service industry (hotels) in a specific geographical area (Rimini, a mature tourist destination on the Italian Adriatic coast). While both organizational change and the history of hotels have been largely investigated by relevant literature, our research activity has peculiar elements of novelty, namely: the development of interdisciplinary methods to study the organizational history of enterprises; the adoption of a process perspective on organizational change; the focus on small hotels that are not part of large hotel chains; the active involvement of hotel owners and managers in every phase of the research. In particular, the adoption of a process perspective for investigating organizational change in Rimini hotels required the definition of a consistent research methodology, able to focus on the history of organizational processes to identify antecedents, alternatives and outcomes of major or pivotal changes: it means investigating and studying organizational and historic processes not as separated but interconnected phenomena but as a single subject of research. In this way, we have been able to understand the actual configurations of hotels by investigating their evolutionary paths and to explain phenomena related to generational shifts and competency and capability development. Results depict the evolutionary paths, the success factors and the dynamics of organizational changes that have been taking place in Rimini hotels for the last ninety years.