Using Template and Matrix Analysis: A case study of Management and Organisation History research

Despite assertions that ‘history matters’, and calls for an ‘historic turn’ and plurality in research methods in management and organisation research, in-depth elaborations of new research methods suitable for handling historical data remain few and far between. This paper presents a qualitative research method using oral history interview data that may advance new types of methodological inquiry in management and organisation history research – and we highlight the potential for extending this approach to handling other types of qualitative temporal data. The method we present combines matrix and template analysis using oral histories from unstructured interviews with thirty-one senior managers in the UK individual personal pensions product market to illuminate how the construction of ‘matrices’ and ‘templates’ can then be compared and contrasted across different time periods, and at different units of analysis, to analyse complex and interdependent processes of organisational and industrial change.