Abstract

Oral history, a method of collecting and interpreting personal commentaries, serves as a valuable tool in historical organisation studies (HOS). Traditionally used to preserve individual testimonies, oral history research in HOS is conducted through extended in-depth interviews underpinned by a participant-centric approach. It can be applied to create publicly available historical sources (via non-anonymised interviews) or to generate research data (via anonymised interviews) for specific projects. While offering emancipatory potential, oral history demands ethical sensitivity to the interviewer-interviewee power dynamics and to the risk of reinforcing hegemonic ideologies. Studies such as Haynes (2010), Śliwa and Taylor (2011), Peticca-Harris et al. (2020), and Giacomin and Jones (2022) exemplify its application and highlight its capacity to enrich organisational research.