Explicating Archival Ethnography:Helmut Käser’s Business Trip

Archival ethnography using microhistorical approaches has considerable untapped potential as a research approach in management and business history. We use a scrapbook compiled by the mid-twentieth century football administrator Dr Helmut Käser on a business trip to Northern Ireland and London in 1967 to illustrate the ethnographic potential of narrating microhistorical cases. The scrapbook demonstrates Käser’s interaction with several contexts which have been understood very separately by historians on his journey and we illustrate how this rare window into business travel in the 1960s helps us to understand how they coexisted and were experienced by actors themselves embedded in global organizations. We can therefore ethnographically experience the world of the past through collections of documents and abstracts which at first might appear ephemeral. We conclude that archival ethnography based on microhistorical approaches has the potential to be a fruitful new avenue of research for management and business historians.