Performing Pan American Airways through Coloniality: An Anti-History approach to Narratives and Business History

This paper centers on the role of narratives in business history from an ANTi-History perspective. We focus on the networked processes through which narratives are told of, for and by multi-national companies embed the development of ‘new imperialism’ and coloniality. We set out to achieve this through a discussion and application of ANTi-History to a study of Pan American Airways and particularly its performance as a maturing multi-national company and its relationship to postcoloniality. In the process, we also hope to contribute to recent calls in business history for more explicit accounts of the methods used in the development of historical accounts. We are concerned to encourage ‘a narrative turn in business history’ but also to do so critically, i.e., to reveal some of the strengths and limitations of a narrative turn. We conclude with reflections on the relationship between methods and the production of (business) history.


Introduction
In the ground-breaking postcolonialist work Orientalism Edward Said (1979) introduces us to the process of the creation of the non-European 'other' through 19 th century English and French literature.Moving beyond Said's representation of cultural ideas, Mignolo (1991) focuses on the multitude of imperialist practices through which the idea of Latin America was developed.In this paper, we build on the work of Mignolo and Said through examination of the role of the multi-national enterprise (MNE) in the re/creation of coloniality through its socio-economic practices and its narrative accounts of those practices.We focus on the development of Pan American Airways (Pan Am) through its operations in the Americas.
Our focus on Pan Am is due to several factors.First, it fits the profile of an ideal typical multinational enterprise as a corporation that does not confine itself 'to domestic operations but participate [s] widely in business beyond the national frontiers, having direct investments in many countries' (Wilkins 1974, vii).Second, Pan Am was established, in 1927, at a particularly critical point in the growth of the US MNE, at a time when 'the American multinationals [had become] far more numerous and on the whole larger than those of other nations' (Chandler 1974, vi).Pan Am exemplifies, what Wilkins (1974) calls, the 'maturing of multinational enterprise' that set the tone for the emergence of the post-WWII multinational and its vast influence on US and foreign economies.As such the history of the US multinational 'is of particular importance for the understanding of the growth and activities of this relatively new economic institution' (Chandler 1974, vi).
Third, for the first ten years of operations Pan Am operated almost exclusively in the former Spanish, Portuguese, French and English colonies to the South of the USA, arguably laying much of the ground for the development of 'new imperialism' throughout the region in the post-WWII era (Grandin 2010).Grandin (2010, 4) refers to 'new imperialism' as the institutionalization of US authority in Latin America through 'a series of multilateral treaties and regional organizations' that drew 'Latin American republics tighter into its political, economic, and cultural orbit', dressed up as 'empire by invitation'.As we shall show, Pan Am exemplified much of this approach, becoming a blueprint for such operations.
To understand Pan Am's role in the development of 'new imperialism' we have chosen to focus on the narratives produced by and associated with the airline.We do so in large part to contribute to recent debates within the field of business history about the role of narratives in the production of history (Clark and Rowlinson 2004;Hansen 2014;Novicevic et al. 2008).Throughout we adopt an ANTi-History approach (Durepos and Mills 2012) to the study of narratives, arguing that the importance of narratives in business history lays not only in the role of narratives per se but also how narratives come to be produced.Through our analysis of Pan Am, we examine the various networked processes through which particular organizational narratives are told; helping us to uncover the relational aspects in the performance of history.
The paper is structured in five sections.First, we outline the recent call for a narrative turn in business history and discuss the relationship between narratives and business history.Second, we outline ANTi-History as an amodern approach to narratives, exploring the differences and convergences with the modernist and postmodernist approaches.In this section we focus particularly on the performance of ANTi-History, outlining key methodological features of the approach.Third, we apply ANTi-History to analysis of a case study of `the German threat' narrative that dominated Pan Am during the period from 1927 to 1947, and discuss narratives from the relational perspective through the examination of selected written histories of Pan Am.Fourth, we move to examination of the performance of the MNE to reveal the role of narratives in establishing/maturing the idea of the MNE.Here we draw on four selected narratives to a) reveal how various narratives cohere in the development of the MNE and b) set up an understanding of performance of postcoloniality.Fifth, we end with discussion and conclusion of the issues raised.

The Call for the Narrative Turn in Business Studies
In recent years, there has been increasing attention to the role of narratives in the social sciences (Czarniawska 2004) and business studies (Clark and Rowlinson 2004).In the latter case, this has been more so the case in 'management studies, marketing and, organizational studies to such a degree that some scholars have framed these new perspectives as a distinctive "narrative turn"' (Mordhorst and Schwarzkopf 2014).
Nonetheless, as Mordhorst and Schwarzkopf (2014) point out, narrative research has 'so far made only limited inroads into the business history community' (see also Clarke andRowlinson 2004 andHansen 2012).It is against this background that we set out to examine the possibilities of narrative analysis for examining organizational pasts.
Narratives can be defined as the relaying of human experience through accounts that are structured as stories that provide, in sequential order, the meaningful telling of events (Stalker 2010, 594).Other accounts go to great lengths to distinguish between stories and narratives (see Eriksson and Kovalainen 2008) but for our purposes we treat the two as similar.The telling of the story involves retrospective interpretations of sequential events from a certain point of view (Soderberg 2003) that is told for a particular audience at a particular time and place (Stalker 2010, 594).In the process the story is co-authored by the audience (Soderberg 2003, 11) as sense is made of the account through interactions that draw on references embedded in the social context and individual experiences.The importance of narratives lies in the fact that its construction and narration is arguably a fundamental human activity, a mode of thinking and being that focuses on human action and is part of identity construction processes (Soderberg 2003, 8, 10).i In the words of White (1987), to raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself.For us this reinforces the importance of the study of narratives for business history.Namely, that in understanding selected developments and their significance in the life of a given organization we need to take account of the narratives that have and are being produced in and around that organization.
In calling for a 'narrative turn' in business history, Mordhorst and Schwarzkopf (2014), however, argue that 'business and management scholars who engage with these questions often ignore that "history", both in the etymological and the disciplinary sense, is born with an inherent tension between "history" as past and "history" as narrative.'Thus, they go on to urge for further engagement 'in discussions about the narrative character of the discipline and its scholarly products' (Mordhorst and Schwarzkopf 2014).
In responding to their call, we view Mordhorst and Schwarzkopf's (2014) observations as a very useful starting point, not least becausefrom an ANTi-History perspective (Durepos and Mills 2012)we are profoundly interested in the tensions they highlight; namely, the distinction between 'history' as past and as narrative.We situate our focus on these tensions in three important discussions -Hayden White's (1984) notion of history as the outcome of narrative choice; Alun Munslow's (2010) concept of 'the-pastas-history,' which characterizes history as a product of its conflation with the past; and actor-network theory (Latour 2005), which focusses on the role of networked actors in the production of 'knowledge.' White, focussing on the narrative choices of the historian, is important in disrupting the idea of history as somehow a discoverable truth about the past; Munslow, locating the historian within discursive positioning, serves to disconnect the past from history, calling the former 'ontologically unobtainable.'The value of Latour's work is in shifting the focus of knowledge production away from wholly the realm of the historian towards a whole network of human (e.g., archivists) and non-human (e.g., history books) actors.
In these three perspectives, we see potential for bridging the gap between socially constructed narratives and experienced events, by focussing on the networking processes that go into how stories depicting 'the past' become produced as knowledge of the past (or history).In other words, we move beyond the historian to explore how conflations of the past and history occur and in such a manner that the process of conflation becomes masked and stories gain meaning from their production as history.This is not to exclude the role of the historian but to suggest that he or she is one, albeit important, storyteller of circulating tales (Kalela 2012)tales whose basis in relational experience leaves them 'open to more than one but less than many' accounts (Mol 2002), rather than to plural, relativist accounts (Munslow 2012).We are, of course, aware of the various debates within history on the value and problems of narratives and representation and we are not suggesting that this is a new issue within the field.Rather, we want to set the stage for the argument that the importance of narratives lies in their relational value to understanding the production/performance of history.As such, we focus on how narratives develop, are maintained and oscillate in the performance of a sense of the-past-as-history.The ANTi-History approach to history and the role of narratives, we contend, contains the seeds of radical possibilities in the process of revealing how powerful narratives come into being and are sustained through a series of actors that serve to privilege certain narratives through an association with history.

ANTi-History
ANTi-History has been described at length elsewhere ii so we will try to provide an overview that deals specifically with the issue of narrativestheir production and their importance in business history.
ANTi-History is an amodern ontological theory that focuses on relational activity as a method for understanding the production of knowledge of the past.Here relationality refers to the processes by which an entity (e.g., an historical account) comes into being through 'the web of connections in which it has become established, the translations that it has performed and the translations that have been performed on it' (de Vries 2016, 65-66).
In other words, 'what an entity is depends on its relations with other entities' (de Vries 2016, 65).Importantly, each entity is viewed as relying on the various relational activities it is involved in and is thus subject to change and potential loss or failure.For example, Matthew Josephson's (1943) history of Pan Am can be viewed as a particular entity in its focus on Juan Trippe as a latter-day `robber baron' and the airline as a monopolistic 'empire of the air'.The formative period when Josephson wrote his book was in the latter stages of Roosevelt's 'New Deal' era and its progressive critique of big business and its rhetoric of postwar democracy.However, by the 1980s Daley (1980) and Bender and Altschul (1982) undermined Josephson's account by weakening some of its key relational aspects.The political climate, for one thing, had seen the advent of the Cold War and critiques of the New Deal era (Morgan 2003) and 1981 saw the onset of the Reagan Presidency.More pointedly, Bender and Altschul (1982, 526), while praising Josephson's account, pointed out its 'unauthorised' status, its many factual errors, and the fact that Juan Trippe 'detested' it.Indeed, Juan Trippe went so far as to commission an authorised version of the airline's history - Daley's (1980) account was the outcome, and he had no problem dismissing Josephson's book as 'superficial' (468).
In contrast to ANTi-History's amodernist approach, it has been argued elsewhere that modernist, or factualist accounts (Rowlinson, 2004), view the past as real and discoverable through appropriate methods.From this ontological perspective the past can be more or less represented through historical accounts or narratives.There is a philosophical grounding in verifiable reality iii and, for this reason, the evaluation of historical accounts, for a modernist business historian is often focussed on the evaluation of the credibility and authenticity of the historical events presented.Elsewhere we have argued: "It would be doing a gross injustice to modernist researchers to suggest that they are unaware of the multitude of problems surrounding the gathering and analysis of archival material.Indeed, much of the discussion of archival research from a modernist perspective involves questions about focus, access, and the evaluation; collection and storage; evidentiary value and triangulation" (Mills & Helms Mills, 2018: 36).For example, in his critique of Robert Daley's (1980) history of Pan Am business historian Wesley Newton (1981) focusses on Daley's methodological vigour and his ability to produce a verifiable history: This…book is not disappointing in terms of its particular genrea popular narrative of an aspect of aviation . . .The writing of novelist and non-fiction writer Robert Daley is superior to most others of its type.Daley's work, unlike most such histories, is enhanced by the employment of scholarly techniques and gives some evidence of sound scholarship.He uses a backnotes device in which a narrative note pinpoints the particular source of a key statement, episode, or character analysis in the relevant chapter-sources include significant secondary sources, oral history interviews, and documents from founder Juan Trippe's Pan American Foundation….As business history, the book does offer insight into Trippe's strategies and the contributions and blunders of others . . . .This book will be exceedingly valuable when the company allows a bona fide business history to be written (118-119).
Newton's closing comment suggests that there is potential for a more authentic, verifiable account through the use of a professional approach to the study of history.
Postmodernist iv accounts, on the other hand, question the very possibility of any verifiable reality of past events outside of language use, which is viewed as open to various interpretations due to context, extant knowledge claims, and power positions.For example, postmodernist accounts of Pan Am have shifted focus on the male leadership of the airline to analysis of the discursive character of the gendered notion of leadership (Dye and Mills 2011) and how this influenced the company's employment of women.While modernist accounts seek to ask `what really happened in the past?' postmodernist accounts seek to explain how understandings of the past are influenced by discursive notions of the present.
While the former looks for salient, verifiable facts the latter searches for dominant discourses.For modernist historians such as Newton existing histories of a business serve as verifiable sources.For postmodernist historians such histories are analysed more for their discursivity than their factual detail.v Here the postmodernist emphasis is on the ontological nature of knowledge, and specifically knowledge of the past.Postmodernists contend that our view of the past is mediated entirely through our knowledge of it (i.e., historical accounts): this view encourages focus on the plurality of individual understandings of the past and helps to explain how and why historians can develop plural accounts of the past, often in conflict with one another.Amodernists, on the other hand, view knowledge as situated in practices that arise out of more-or-less stable sets of relationships that serve to enact and create our view of the object(s) of study vi (e.g., the past as history) vii : this view encourages focus on identifying the processes through which sets of relationships as practice come to perform history (i.e., to produce a particular sense of the past).This moves the primary focus away from the factual details of a given history viii (realist), and from the discursive role of the historian (postmodernist), to a study of the processes through which any given history is produced by various related human and non-human interactions and performances (amodernist).For example, Durepos, Helms Mills and Mills (2008) focussed on how a given history of Pan Am (that of Daley 1980) came to be produced and how it subsequently informed knowledge of the airline.During a study of gender practices in the development of Pan Am -at the Pan American Airways Collection (341) at the University of Miami's Otto Richter Library- Durepos et al. (2008) discovered a large number of documents that allowed them to trace the various actors involved in the development of, what became, Daley's (1980) history of the airline.They concluded that: The example of writing a company history of Pan Am has been used to show the multitude of actors, networks, materials, associations and disassociations making up the social context, and shaping or influencing the nature of the Pan Am story.
Finally, it is suggested that as this series of actors, networks, materials, associations as well as disassociations come to be ordered and shape the content of the Pan Am story, they are retrospectively silenced and forgotten.Presented as a final product of much ordering work is a book, whose lines reveal a `settled story' of a series of events that are taken for granted as `factual' information (Durepos et al. 2008, 76).
To summarize, ANTi-Historians seek out the multiple accounts that arise from relational practice and the different enactments that one phenomenon may take in varying situated practices as well as different sets of relations ix (relational positioning).In terms of outcomes, the realist historian produces a history of a particular subject (e.g., Wilkins' [1974] account of the role of Pan American Airways in the development of the multinational enterprise in its mature form); these often rich and varied accounts provide interesting and creative stories that make us think about the past but which, we argue, are problematic in their truth claims and the implications for alternative viewpoints.The postmodernist produces an account of the changing discursive contexts in which businesses come to be understood (e.g., Jacques' [1996] account of the discursive nature of management theory over time); these penetrating accounts not only provide insights into the discursive character of historical accounts but also of history itself.While this reveals the ephemeral nature of history it leaves open the question of the importance of history in social life and the processes through which it is produced.The amodernist produces an account of the relational activities that go into either producing or inhibiting the production of a specific history (e.g., Myrick, Helms Mills and Mills' [2013] account of how a singular, dominant, history of the Academy of Management came to be produced); this, we contend, can encourage both a focus on the production and importance of history.
The dual pursuit of surfacing historical accounts while revealing their ultimate basis in social production is undertaken through a process, adapted from Actor-network Theory, x of following relevant actorshuman (e.g., archivists), non-human (e.g., archival collections), and non-corporeal xi (e.g., the idea of history)as they ultimately network in the production of a particular knowledge claim (e.g., a specific history of Pan Am).Thus, the hyphen in ANTi-History signals the tension between the desire to produce new and alternative histories while revealing their source in the social construction, or assembling, of 'knowledge' through networks of relations.
Using this approach, we argue, following White (1984) and Carr (2008), that narratives, both in terms of the stories told by, about, and for the organization (see for example, Martin et al. 1983), and in terms of the written histories that come to be produced through the work of the professional and popular historian xii , provide significant sources to capturing organizational history.Nonetheless, the ultimate importance of narratives, we contend, is how they are produced and what light the production, and the process involved throws on a given understanding of an organization and those constituted by that understanding.In particular, we are interested in how Pan Am's narration as a maturing multi-national enterprise (MNE) helped to shape the idea of the MNE.

Performing ANTi-History
In using ANTi-History we draw broadly on intellectual insights from the sociology of knowledge literature (in particular the work of Mannheim [1936] and Marx and Engels [1947] ) and more specifically we adapt the methodological approach of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 2005).A key difference between ANTi-History and ANT is that the latter has tended to treat history as separable from the assembly of knowledge (i.e., as a separate and almost concrete set of activities that precede extant knowledge) (Durepos and Mills 2012).xiii ANTi-History, on the other hand, treats history itself as a critical actor in the development of knowledge, i.e., of the past in the present.Hartt (2013) refers to history as a non-corporeal actant, whose influence is felt at an ephemeral rather than a material level.At its best this can involve a double loop process of identifying the actors involved in the development of historical understandings of the past and then examining how those understandings play a role in the production of knowledge per se.xiv Nonetheless, we draw on ANT concepts of actor (to include human and non-human actors), enrollment (as a process whereby one actor joins with the activities of another actor to reinforce a particular knowledge claim), translation (a process through which a particular knowledge claim takes on a specific direction or contours), and punctuation (where the formulation of a particular knowledge claim becomes, at least for a time, fixedserving as a dominant or accepted view of events as combinations of actors' interests fuse for a time in a networked series of relationships).The process whereby the enrollment, translation and punctuation of a particular knowledge claim (e.g., a history of Pan American Airways) takes shape through the fusing of different socio-political interests is never ultimately stable.Actornetworks are always more-or-less subject to processes of oscillation that can always lead to the breakdown of the network and the development of different networks and different, sometimes competing, knowledge claims.xv   To say we perform ANTi-History is a reference to the idea that particular knowledge claims (including accounts of the past) rely on enactment xvi .For example, knowledge claims embedded in certain laws may fall into disrepair through years of nonenforcement.The notion of performance also takes account of our own role in seeming to produce knowledge of how knowledge is produced.We shall return to that issue later.To understand enactment in the formation, maintenance, and collapse of knowledge claims, Latour argues that we need to 'follow the actors' involved.Typically, with few exceptions (e.g.Law 2002), this has involved ethnographic studies of the role of human (e.g., laboratory technicians, scientists, etc.) and non-human (e.g., test tubes, computers, scientific papers) actors (see, for example, Law [1994] and Latour and Woolgar [1986]).
In other words, Latour is literally encouraging us to follow actors as they perform the elements that will become knowledge claims.The idea of non-humans as actors is one of the most contested and least understood of Actor-Network Theory (Law and Hassard 1999).At the very least it encourages us to reflect on the role of language and our preconceived notions of action.But is also encourages us to look at all the parts that go into the assembly of a particular knowledge claim (or history).To give one brief example: Daley's (1980) history of Pan Am as 'An American Saga', once written, arguably took on its own importance as an influence on people's perception of Pan Am.Readers are influenced not only by the book's selected content and other supporting elements (e.g. the dust cover, the photographs, the layout, etc.) but also by the embedded conventions of style and narrative.xvii   To conclude, we have argued in this section that there are two important areas of narrative analysis -1) those stories produced by networks of actors through accounts of lived experiences 2) those stories that are developed by historians to make sense of past events.From a relational perspective, we see the two points of narrative production to be equivocal points rather than hierarchical levels.What we argue here is that when one wants to understand how particular organizational narratives come to be produced and maintained, narratives of the past should be viewed from the perspective of networked relations, including those that are solely attributed to historians.We will next address these two areas, and illustrate, and discuss, the potential of ANTi-History in conducting such analysis, using examples from Pan Am.

Narratives from the Relational Perspective
In contrast to the ethnographic preferences of ANT, ANTi-History approaches have drawn on archival sources to 'follow the actors' over time.This presents its own problems, as we discuss below.

'German Threat' as an Example of Stories Produced by Networks of Actors
To take one example from histories of Pan Am we turn to the link between the company's emergent role (late-1920s-1940) as an MNE with the aid of the `U.S.State Department (see, for example, Bender and Altschul 1982) in South America and the development of a narrative about `the German Threat' to the region.We take this as an interesting starting point because of its punctuated (i.e., fixed) role across published histories of the airline.xviii     In other words, the story works to enroll others by the very fact that a similar story is told across several accounts, and thus appearing as a verifiable truth through crossreferencing.xix   In following the various actors in the development and telling of the narrative of a German threat to the region we find, in the archives xx and various histories, a number of actors that include Major Hap Arnold, Juan Trippe, Peter von Bauer, selected members of the State Department, the Colombian-based airline Sociedad Colombo-Alemana de Transportes Aéreos (SCADTA), historians (Bender, Altschul, Daley, Josephson) and airline histories (respectively, The Chosen Instrument, An American Saga, and Empire of the Air).
In the early 1920s, Arnold, a military officer who had seen action against the Germans in World War I, expressed concerns about a potential threat to United States interests through the development of German-owned aviation interests in South America.
It is far from clear whether Arnold's concerns were entirely military, commercial or some combination of the two.In any event, he attempted to address the concerns through the establishment of a commercial airline.Arnold was not successful in establishing an airline but his proposed name -Pan American Airwayswas adopted by a rival consortium that included Juan Trippe.Here we see a fairly strong enrollment processwith Arnold and fellow officers, State Department officials, and Pan Am executives working together to counteract German influence in South America.The ultimately weak and oscillating point (hovering between commercial and military concerns), however, is the translation process, with variations in what constitutes a German threat.Thus, despite the eventual rise of Hitler from 1933 onwards, while government concerns with Nazi-ism were growing, Pan Am continued to employ Balluder (despite Naval Intelligence concerns that he was a Nazi sympathizer) (Bender and Altschul 1982, 314) and Charles Lindbergh (a leading pro-German sympathizer) up to the onset of the United States entry into World War II.xxi   This gulf in translation (of the German threat) changed in 1940.Trippe agreed to a U.S. government plan, in conjunction with the Colombian government, and the involvement of (now) Major General Arnold, to stage a dramatic takeover of SCADTA.
This was effected through the use of Colombian troops, on a given day and time, to remove all German's from the airline and replace them on the spot with Pan American crews.In the aftermath, Pan Am was heralded in the U.S. press as a heroic, patriotic company that had helped to remove a Nazi threat to the Panama Canal.xxii In subsequent years this story became the prime narrative associated with the German threat, serving to equate `German' with `Nazi' threat: a retrospective sensemaking (Weick 1995) of the reasons for fearing Germany influence.This particular retrospective account begins to get punctuated by and through a series of authors and histories.Three years after the forcible ejection of SCADTA's German flyers Josephson's book links concern with German nationality to anti-Nazi sentiment.Offering very little evidence, Josephson describes the Austrian-born von Bauer as someone who was not originally a Nazi but who had become one by 1938.
As if to reinforce the point, Josephson (1943, 157) goes on to describe von Bauer as being able to pass for a naturalized Colombian citizen but who seemed 'more and more like other Germans'.It is likely that the World War II context in which he was writing served to influence Josephson and his U.S. readers in the equating of Nazi-ism with German nationality.In the early 1980s, two further histories of Pan Am linked the German threat with Nazi-ism in general and SCADTA in particular.Daley, for example, refers to SCADTA as either Axis-owned or Axis-influenced and reinforces this through the ambiguous statement that the airline's operational language was German and not Spanish (1980,292).
In terms of our relational approach, the story of the German threat is an important narrative in the development of Pan American Airways.It doesn't matter whether it is true or accords more or less with certain facts but rather that it reflects aspects of thinking within the airline that has an influence on how people came to think of/and lead their organization.
In this case, the story's development, maintenance and oscillation over time provide insights into its influence, viability and outcomes.

The Historian's Narrative -A Relational Perspective
The problem of narratives in history does not only revolve around stories told by members of the organization but how those stories are told by the historian in the production/performance of a history.For modernist historians, the use of narratives to re/construct a history is a methodological choice that at best is a necessary evil; something to be tempered as much as possible to avoid imposition of meaning that it not clearly found in the facts of the story.Nonetheless, there is recognition that facts do not simply speak for themselves.Some level of interpretation and appeal to structured meaning (e.g., a narrative) may be necessary.However, postmodernist historians contend that, in many respects, the historian's narrative is central to history-making (Jenkins 1991;Munslow 2010).We agree with this in one important respect, namely that individual historians, especially through their published work, serve to punctuate certain accounts.However, as we argue below, focus on the individual historian is part of the effect of punctuation by obfuscating the various relational aspects of the process of writing a history.
First, let us remind ourselves of one of the historian's role in producing a particular account.Much of this leads us back to the work of White (1973) who argues that narratives don't simply impose meaning on events but owe much of their form to cultural understandings of how we create meaning.Those arguments are well known and include the contention that narratives impose rather than discover order in so-called real events.
The elements of imposition include emplotment, or choice of storyline, and `the context in the text' (i.e., the culturally acceptable or dominant way of thinking and moralizing about any issue that precedes a given text) (White 1987).For White this suggests that any given set of real events can be emplotted in any number of ways, giving rise to any number of different stories (pluralism) (White 1987, 44).White goes on to argue that the choice of story type imposed on events endow them with meaning but that there are no other grounds to be found in the historical record for preferring one way of construing meaning over another: the process is referential whereby the sign (e.g., an element of the narrative) is at one and the same time proof of reality (Ibid.,44,75,36).
To use another example from Pan Am, we turn to examine four selected histories of the organization xxiii .There are many similarities across these histories, with Juan Trippe viewed as the leading figure in the airline's development as an international airline.
However, the emplotment of each story casts Trippe and his accomplishments in a different light.In the process, many details of the stories vary not only in terms of what is included/excluded but their characterization of people and events.For Josephson (1943), Trippe is the anti-hero of a satirical tale xxiv in which Trippe emulates the robber barons of a previous era in exploiting much of South America and China to establish one of the most romantic of modern pioneering enterprises in the world.In contrast, Daley (1980) uses a romantic style xxv in which Trippe is the hero who virtually single-handedly opened up the world to commercial flight.Bender and Altschul (1982), on the other hand, have more of a tragic tale xxvi to tell of the rise and fall of Trippe.Like Daley, they cast Trippe as something of a genius in single-handedly building the airline but they go on to focus on changing world events that influence Trippe's downfall and demise as an organizational leader.Unlike the other accounts, Wilkins (1974)  Altschul, Daley's heroic account was arguably influenced by the fact that he was hired by the company to write a history.Both histories were influenced by the existence of a considerable trove of archived materials that contained a large number of narrative accounts of the airline's history.These archived accounts were developed from an interest by a leading group of Pan Am executives in the early 1950s, including Juan Trippe and Charles Lindbergh, to develop a history of the company (Bender and Altschul 1982, 526-527).This relatively small but important group of actors began to translate the form of the history as to be largely focussed on the heroic role of Juan Trippe and selected directors of the company.This made it difficult to find a credible historian willing to write a history to order.They eventually, in 1957, hired aviation writer Wolfgang Langewiesche to write the history (Leslie 1970).Over the next twelve years Langewiesche set about collecting airline stories about people and events from numerous employees and former employees of the airline.Although Langewiesche did not go on to write a history of the companyhe parted company with the airline in 1969his series of transcribed stories had some influence on both the Daley and the Bender and Altschul books.
In 1970 John Leslie, a former Vice President of the airline, worked on Langewiesche's interviews for his own (unsuccessful) attempt to write a history.Leslie went on to play an important role in the selection and hiring of the eventual history writer detective fiction novelist Robert Daley.Before this point at least three other influential actors came into play -the establishment of the Pan American Foundation (PAF) as a repository for (selected) corporate documents, the series of documents and artifacts deposited in the PAF, and the curator of the documents, Althea Lister (Bender and Altschul 1982, 527-528).Each of these f/actors in their own but related way shaped the narratives told by Daley, but also by Bender and Altschul by influencing what was deemed worthy and interesting enough to be archived (and what was not important).From a realist perspective, these factors are the normal processes involved in the development of a moreor-less accurate account of historical events.From the relational -ANTi-Historyperspective all the factors involved, including the human (the historians) and non-human (the books, archival materials) actors, can be seen as serving to enroll the writers of history into a commitment to produce a history of Pan Am and one that is shaped by what has come to be included in the various writings and documents.In taking in account Josephson's book, for example, we need to give thought to how his worldview was shaped by the time he was writing (during WWII) but also by the dominant conventions of writing and historiography of the time.xxviii   We are making two key points here in discussing the role of narratives in business history.First, the importance of narratives lies not in their representational value in capturing and making meaning of real events but rather in their existence as sensemaking outcomes of relational activities.xxix In other words, narratives are not so important about what they purport to represent as much as the processes involved in the creation of apparent representation.Second, in analysing narratives to understand how histories are produced, we need to view all narratives as equivocal rather than hierarchical.This means that we need to problematize not only the relational elements that go into a particular narrative (e.g., the role of Juan Trippe in Pan Am) but also those relational activities that go into the inscription of certain narratives through the historian as networked actor (e.g., the relational influences on the production of any one of the existing histories of Pan Am).

Performing the MNE
Pan Am was a U.S.-based international aviation company operating from 1927 until 1991.Trippe wanted to establish and expand his airline throughout South America and the State Department wanted to block other foreign powers from gaining a significant position in the air routes from Latin America to the US as well as establish air power in the Southern hemisphere (Daley 1980).
The establishment and expansion of Pan Am was achieved through a series of acquisitions that saw the airline's operations spread to Mexico, Peru andChile (1929), andArgentina, Bermuda, Colombia andBrazil (1930).By the early 1930s Pan Am had routes operating from Brownsville (Texas) and Miami (Florida) down both coasts of South America as far as Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Montevideo (Uruguay).xxx By now it had become the world's largest international airline.Flights to Alaska followed in 1932 and to China in 1935.The advent of World War II saw Pan Am flying into various parts of Europe, Africa and Australasia.
The business history of Pan Am can be viewed, for example, through Mira Wilkins' (1974) 'magisterial study of American multinational enterprises' (front cover).xxxi We learn, however, that it achieves its aims without resort to the study of organizational narratives.The section on Pam Am, for example, is a chronicle of important decisions made by Juan Trippe and the economic contexts in which they were made.Indeed, the primary study of the development of MNE's is conducted through a focus on rational decision-making around cost analysis, profit margins, etc.As valuable as this focus is, Wilkins gives us little understanding of why, where and when company executives make supposedly rational decisions, or what the consequences may be.For example, Wilkins (1974) refers to Juan Trippe's decision to 'secretly' purchase SCADTA as an outcome of his not wanting to be 'foiled' in his attempt to establish a service between the United States and Colombia.We do not gain any understanding of why the need for secrecy or why being 'foiled' mattered to Trippe, or even the eventual impact that the decision had on Colombia.
Similarly, Wilkins refers to the dwindling of 'United Fruit's empire abroad', as, in part due to 'changing sentiments in the countries where it operated', and that International Telephone and Telegraph 'began to divest of foreign utilities' because of 'adversity abroad' (Wilkins 1974, 423).These 'sentiments' and 'adversity', we contend, were accompanied by narratives of anti-US imperialism that need to be understood in relationship to the companies' own narrative sensemaking of their operations and relations with nationals of other countries (see, for example, Zinn [1999] and Grandin [2010]).
In our search for dominant narratives we came across a 1942 history of the company that brings together many of the prevalent themes we had found dotted throughout the archival materials in the Pan Am Collection.The accountthe Story of the Eastern (`Mother') Division, Pan American Airways System, 1927-1942 was produced by the airline's Public Relations Department and positions Pan Am as a heroic, pioneering, technologically advanced, patriotic, international company and its neighbours to the South as passive, backward, in need of help and discovery.We will examine these in turn.
Before we proceed we need to, however, make one more critical point.In following actors in the production and performance of narratives we are in something of a double bind because the 'who' (e.g., key male directors of Pan Am) and 'what' (e.g., the pioneering role of selected male directors and pilots of Pan Am) we are following, is privileged over the people and stories that did not get mentioned and/or were largely ignored.xxxii For example, the overwhelming number of materials in Pan Am archives focus on the role and accomplishments of US-born, Caucasian men.The same is true for almost all the various histories of the airline (exceptions include Barry 2007, Whitelegg, 2007, and Yano 2011).Stories, especially positive ones, of non-white, foreign (i.e., non-US) citizens are even more rare in the annals of Pan Am history.It is against this background that we next turn to examine Pan Am's performance of, what was to become, the multinational enterprise and its contribution to postcoloniality throughout the region.

Heroism, Adventure and Pioneering
From its earliest days, Pan Am described itself as a heroic pioneering company.In the company's annual reports this comes to mean the first to do something new in a particular field of endeavour (e.g., 'technological feats' in Pan American Airways 1930a, 11) as well as conflating it with 'geographic reach' (Ibid.)and 'romantic venture' (Ibid.).xxxiii In the process, it is Latin America that is 'discovered' and in a way that aligns Pan Am with the conquering Spanish colonialists: The old-time explorers, the bloody conquistadores driving their conquests through virgin lands with sword and flame, the hardy pioneers of both Americas slashing their settlements out of the wilderness---these are well matched by the Americans of 1927 and succeeding years who pushed the pioneering inter-American airline from Florida south, throwing the great loops of the international 'railway lines of the air' around and across the Caribbean sea, over the rough reaches of Mexico and Central America, down the Pacific coast, over the lofty Andes, barrier of the ages, and around the great South American continent.These great tasks with all their complicated detail called for pioneering of a type similar to that which has marked all the world's great periods of progress.(Pan American World Airways, 1942)

Patriotism and Modernity
Two other narrative themes that get conflated in Pan Am's narration are the idea of the airline as technologically advanced and the attribution of this to (United States) Americanism: Air express service for the shipment of goods between the United States and seventeen Latin American countries was inaugurated on June 4 th [1931] by the Pan American Airways. . .'In the interest of American business, which for several years has stressed the need for a rapid and dependable means of transport for export merchandise, the study of air express through the many countries served on the international airway was undertaken.After two years of pioneering and research the system has been perfected to the point where it can function to these seventeen countries with the same reliability and efficiency that have distinguished the U.S. international mail service'.(Pan American Airways 1931b, 129,132) In other stories Pan Am's narrators seem dedicated to expressing how groundbreaking the company is in terms of international routes, technical capability, a number of firsts in global reach and its world leadership in the field of aviation.

The Good Neighbour
Perhaps mindful of the need to work with Latin Americans as partners, political supporters and customers, an early Pan Am narrative developed around the theme of being a good neighbour.Thus, for example, in the airline's 1929 annual report the company's efforts to acquire a number of Latin American airlines is described as 'a community effort on the part of the United States aviation industry to extend safe and reliable American air transport to the foreign field.'(PanAmerican Airways 1929, 4).At times the narrative would obscure the airline's political and cultural links to the United States: For example, in a 1930 edition of the airline's newsletter it was declared that: Our Real Job . . .isn't just busy running an air line . . .but is the bringing together into happy, profitable relationships, the seventy-five millions of South America and the hundred and fifty millions of North America. . . .Pan American Airways System is not just a United States company.It is a national company in each country it serves and becomes more so as its service is of greater value'.(Pan American Airways 1930b, 30) At other times, the narrative images Pan Am as more in a (North American) leadership role, especially with the development of President Roosevelt's `Good Neighbor' Policy, following his election in 1932 (see Holden and Zolov 2011): Probably nowhere in the world has air transportation made such an important impact on culture and economy as in Latin Americathe birthplace and cradle of Pan American.Just as railroads played the key role in unifying and developing the United States, it was the airplanewhich could soar over sea, mountains and junglesthat played the same vital part in bringing together the American nations.From its start as the pioneer in the field of international transportation, Pan American has emerged as the largest operator of air transportation in Latin America today.Its career over the past three decades aptly illustrated the advancement in making true neighbors out of the world's peoples.(PanAmerican Airways 1957, 1-2) The Native 'Other' The various narratives associated with Pan Am do not only construct images of the airline but -either directly or through implicationthe people and countries in which the airline operates.The likening of Pan Am's activities to the conquistadores, for example, provides justification for the original colonization by the Spanish and Portuguese.Consequently, the people of the region are imaged as somehow incapable (or less capable) of discovering their own destinies.Elsewhere, 'reliability and efficiency' are presented as qualities of Americanism rather than of Latin Americans.
However, images of the Latin American other and the idea of Latin America are not simply unintended and indirect.At one level, Latin Americans are portrayed as being one amorphous group of people: The average Latin American personality and temperament is not always well adapted to mechanical work and does not fit easily into a large welldisciplined organization.[They are, nonetheless, worth hiring by a company such as Pan Am because they] "are usually content with their lot, can live healthily and happily, and usually require considerably lower wages than American personnel" (Leslie 1934, 70).xxxiv   A similar characterization appears in an internal memo accessing the 'Traffic situation in Venezuela'.The author writes to advise the company of morale problems among young male employees who have moved from the US, likely due to 'the glamour of foreign work [that] made them overlook the discomforts and unusual living conditions found in latin America' (sic).He goes on to contend that 'the lustre is wearing off [and] men in some of the lesser countries and cities are realizing the undesirable features of their living and social conditions.The food may be poor, good quarters may be unobtainable or there may be an absolute lack of decent entertainment or social intercourse' (Citek 1930).The contrasting theme of modern and primitive runs through much of Pan Am's materials and activities.Citek (1930), for example, goes on to contrast US employees with 'native employees', most of whom are 'entirely unfamiliar with American business methods and efficient performance'.A different level of contrast can be seen in the following comment from Juan Trippe at the Christening of Clipper Friendship, Buenos Aires, July 4, 1950: Argentina is a land where . . .our countrymen feel most at home.Like the United States, Argentina is a product of European immigration.And like us you have fused Old World Culture with New World progress (Trippe 1950).
Here, once again, we see the trope of modernity and progress and the introduction of race through reference to European heritage.
Other stories were cruder in their expressions, as in a commentary about airplane maintenance: 'We had two native mechanics.One was deaf and dumb; the other didn't happen to be deaf' (Pan Am, undated).xxxv Or a complaint, voiced in a `Traveller's Report' by the Export Manager of Canada Dry International, that 'In Sao Paulo, the man who checked my papers could not rad (sic) English and certainly little Spanish' (Schoppmeyer 1944).Language was also a regular complaint in other materials, as, for example, in a 1934 article bemoaning that fact that 'English "as she is spoke" is greatest problem to management' (Pan American Airways 1934).Not all stories were derogatory and there is evidence of positive accounts of South Americans.In one example, Pan Am personnel are referred to as `new pioneers' in contrast to old pioneers of indigenous origin (Pan American Airways 1933); hospitality is said to be a 'characteristic of our Southern friends' (Pan American Airways 1944); and Cubans are described as 'industrious' (Pan American Airways 1943).As patronizing as these comments may seem they are more positive in their accounts of Latin Americans than the bulk of Pan American stories of `the other.'However, none of these stories appear to have enrolled other aspects of the airline into more positive imaging of Latin American.Largely, this may be due to the source of the comments -mostly traveler's reports that appeared during WWII wartime visits to the region.It is likely that the other narratives worked better (viz.stronger and more dominant) through their links to other actors such as wartime patriotism and US military presence throughout South America; American exeptionalism; the progressive ('New Deal') as well as the conservative (US State Department) elements of the Roosevelt administration whose interests fused at points of wartime aims (Persico 2003).

Discussion and Conclusion
In this paper, we set out to develop a case for a narrative turn in business history using an amodernist, ANTi-History approach, applied to a study of Pan American Airways.We drew on a selection of narratives from Pan Am to demonstrate the oscillating character of narratives (viz.shifting in meaning) and the use of ANTi-History as an amodernist methodology.We focussed on the German Threat to reveal the different actors involved in the development and performance of a particular narrative associated with the history of Pan Am.Those actors included not only a range of senior managers and pilots but also the way that books and archives serve to influence perceptions of events.xxxvi We concede that the notion of non-human things as actors is difficult to study from an empirical basis but we argue that revisiting language use and rethinking who and what influences our perceptions has the potential to remain open in our focus.
Through a focus on the German Threat and the role of Juan Trippe we argued that certain narrative accounts could have a powerful hold over how people think about events and what they accept as knowledge of the past.In other words, they could serve as powerful shapers of how an organization history is viewed and constructed.Indeed, as Hansen (2012) contends, narratives arguably provide opportunity for examining issues of power.
We were also interested in revealing how narratives can be more or less stable or punctuated depending on the degree of enrollment and translation.The German Threat provides an example where strong enrollment seemed to unite a different set of actors despite differences in perception of what the actual German Threat was.
Through our analysis of the selected histories of Pan Am we argued that narratives should we viewed as equivocal rather than hierarchical.We have shown how particular versions of the organization came to be produced, distributed and supported through the relational influences on the production of each of these histories.Thus, we argue that when we want to understand how histories are produced, we need to examine also the historian as a networked actor.
In our example of performing the MNE we focussed on the relationship between narratives and organizational development, especially into the form of a multinational company.As Hansen (2012, 697) puts it, 'history in the shape of historical narratives is a basic part of any group's culture and identity, be it national or organizational, such as a company'.Stories are not only a way to produce selfidentity, but they also build relations to others (Eriksson and Kovalainen 2008, 211).We examined how some of the narratives associated with Pan Am may be linked to the development and continuance of postcoloniality but may also provide insights into non-rational motivation associated with the development of the MNE.
In this latter case we suggest that narrative may reveal a range of sociopsychological drives that motivate corporate leaders to put themselves in dominant economic and social positions.In this section we have tried to reveal something about the drives and motivations of corporate leaders and senior managers that go beyond, or perhaps underscore, rational economic motives.There are capitalists and there are capitalists.In Juan Trippe's case he seemed motivated by the romance of air travel, political intrigue, the thrill of being on the cutting edge of new technologies, being seen as a pioneer, and somehow pride in the knowledge that his accomplishments served Americanism.These non-rational motives have longed been recognised outside of business history and suggest a different and unique role for narrative analysis in trying to understand the psychological drives behind business (see, for example, Kets de Vries 1991).In the process we also get glimpses of metanarratives of postcoloniality with airline narratives not simply engaging with Latin America but simultaneously contributing to the ongoing (Western) idea of Latin America (see Mignolo 1991).Clearly further work is needed here to find ways of identifying the role of identity work and psychology in the development of narratives.In terms of postcoloniality, we were able to demonstrate that narratives can have a powerful effect on perception of 'the non-Western other' and subsequent relationships with peoples of our countries.We also contend that it was even harder to follow the marginalized Latin American of the main narratives except through the US-centric lens of the Pan Am narratives.While various elements of the Pan Am narratives reveal evidence of postcolonial thinking they do not facilitate an uncovering of the voices of the silenced Latin Americans.Using this set of examples, we raised the dual problem of `following the actors' who have not been cast and their stories not told i.e., people and events whose narratives are silenced (Decker 2013).Our solution was to seek to understand, through the study of featured relations, how and why alternative people and narratives become marginalized and/or silenced but concede that this remains problematic.
Throughout our analysis we suggested but did not develop the notion of narratives in social context (Eriksson and Kovalainen 2008, 219).We did, however, indicate that the German Threat took on different understandings in different sociopolitical contexts and that gender narratives varied significantly at different point in time.Further research is needed here from an ANTi-History perspective to make sense of the idea of context from a relational point of view.xxxvii Notes i For Roland Barthes narrative "is simply there like life itself . . .international, transhistorical, transcultural"quoted in White (1987, 1).
ii For a complete overview of ANTi-History and its application to business history see Durepos and Mills (2012), Mills and Durepos (2010); Hartt et al. (2017);and Durepos and Mills (2017).
iii We use the terms `more or less' and `ultimate' advisedly to make clear that modernist historians are clearly aware of the problems of representation from the various influences (e.g., the specific character of an archive) on the reproduction of historical events and people.iv There is something of a debate in the social sciences and humanities about the difference between postmodernist and poststructuralist accounts.Some argue that the latter is a sub-set of the formere.g., Eriksson and Kovalainen (2008), while others argue that there are distinct differencese.g., Prasad (2005).For our purposes here we view the two as variations of the same approach.v This is not to suggest that postmodernists are uninterested in the factual detail of a given work but rather how such facts might contribute to a particular discourse.For example, it is argued that Juan Trippe avoided using his first name for concern that he might be taken for a Latino (Daley 1980).If that is factually correct it provides insights into a certain form of racist discourse that was circulating in the airline at the time: Betty Trippe's (1996) diary seems to confirm such a way of thinking.However, the fact that this story was circulating in 1980 provides the postmodernist historian was evidence of current thinking at the time of the book's publication.vi Ibid.vii Munslow (2010) refers to this conflation of the past as history as `the-past-as-history' viii This is not to say that amodernists (or postmodernists for that matter) ignore factual elements but rather that the notion of what counts as factual is contested.It is not, for example, disputed that Juan Trippe helped to found Pan American Airways so much as why historical accounts choose to focus on Trippe and what they make of that starting point.ix Ibid.
x In particular the work of Latour (2005); Law (1994) , andCallon (1999).xi The term non-corporeal actant comes from Hartt (2013) xii Here we, respectively, distinguish between the professionally trained historian and those without specific training in history who, nonetheless, set out to write historical accounts of people and events.We imply no judgement in the distinction.xiii Recent attempts to develop ANT approaches to historical developments have compounded this problem.See, for example, the otherwise excellent work of Bruce and Nyland (2011) xiv See Myrick, Helms Mills and Mills (2013).Secord and Corrigan (2015) refer to this as nesting, i.e., layers of historical knowledge embedded within extant knowledge.xv  Kuhn (1962) captures something of this in the formation and eventual breakdown of paradigmatic communities of thought.xvi White (1987) argues that the production of meaning through narration can be regarded as a performance, because any given set of real events can be emploted in a number of ways, and can thus bear the weight of being told as any number of different kinds of stories (44).In this statement we can also see evidence of the plural approach discussed above xvii White (1973) makes the point that there are a limited number of narrative forms and styles that influence the writing of history.xviii  Bender and Altschul (1982), The Chosen Instrument; Daley (1980), An American Saga; Josephson (1943), Empire of the Air.xix From a realist perspective similar accounts may be evidence of the truthful character of what is depicted.From our perspective it can be taken as the reproduction of dominant stories from networks of actors associated with Pan over the years.xx Here we are referring to The Pan American World Airways Collection 341, Otto Richter Library, University of Miami.xxi In some quarters this translated into pro-Nazi sentimentssee Wallace (2003).xxii For a full account of the events described see Durepos, Helms Mills and Mills (2008) xxiii These are, respectively, Josephson, Empire of the Air, Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, Daley, An American Saga, and Bender and Altschul, The Chosen Instrument.xxiv Drawing on White (1973) satire is defined as "a focus absurdity and a questioning of such things as the role of individual attributes, the fates, and harmony in the resolve of organizational problems - Bryman et al. (2011), 430-431.xxv A "focus on the heroic qualities of the individual" -Ibid.
xxvi A "focus on the impact of fate on events, usually with a bad ending" -Ibid.xxvii A "focus on human beings as part of a greater organic whole, not subject to fate so much as resolving things through harmonious relations" -Ibid.xxviii Kalela (2012) argues that the writing of a history (or history-making as he sees it) is influenced, among other things, by disciplinary (i.e., ideas and standards from the field of the professional historian), public (i.e., governmental documents and artifacts that support a particular view of certain historical events), and popular (i.e., notions of historical figures and events that are produced and reproduced through cultural processes like cinema, novels, etc.) accounts.xxix Here we agree with postmodernist historiography in regard to the problems of representationsee, for example, Jenkins (2003) xxx By 1931 the airline was organized into Caribbean, Western and Brazilian Divisions (Pan American Airways 1930), serving thirty-six 'countries and colonies ' over 20,664 'international' route miles, up from 251 in 1928(Pan American Airways 1931a,12) xxxi The "magisterial" comment on the book is by Alfred Chandler and appears on the book's jacket.xxxii A similar point is made by Burton (2005), and more recently by accounts by Mills andHelms Mills (2011) andDecker (2013).xxxiii Arguably this latter use of the term pioneer harps back to what Prasad (1997) refers to as a particularly Western notion of pioneering.xxxiv Leslie, a Pan Am executive at the time, made this assessment in his MIT Master' degree (Leslie 1934).Leslie went on to become a Vice President of the airline and an influential actor in the development of Daley's (1980) history of the company.xxxv The comment is attributed to Basil Rowe who founded West Indian Aerial Express and went on to serve as Chief Pilot of Pan Am's Atlantic Division.xxxvi According to Decker (2013) such events are usually "uneven, complex and confusing [lending themselves to] multiple explanations, [and] the eventual choice to prioritize one account over another, the bias inherent in the intellectual framework of the researcher, and the fundamental silence of some historical sources, " 160.See also Mordhorst (2014) on businesses as both embedded in and simultaneously creators of national identity and culture.xxxvii Gabrielle Durepos and Trish Genoe McLaren are currently working on this issue and have presented a paper at the 2015 Academy of Management and the Critical Management Studies conferences.
Trippe would go on to lead Pan Am.Nonetheless, Arnold continued to express his concerns to members of the State Department who, by the late 1920s, were supporting Trippe in his ambitions to expand Pan Am routes to much of South America.Here again, it is not clear what the specific nature of the various parties' concerns were.In terms of the State Department the concerns with German influence may have been specifically xenophobic or part of a general concern (a la Monroe doctrine) with any foreign influence in South America.Trippe's concern seemed to be more centred on the existence of SCADTA as a strong foreign competitor, established eight years earlier than Pan Am and capable of developing routes to North America as well as throughout South America.The fact that SCADTA was largely owned by Austrian-born Peter von Bauer and flown by (naturalized-Colombian) German pilots did not seem to be a significant factor in Trippe's concern with his rival in the late 1920s.At this stage, Germany was still a democratic state and Hitler was an insignificant and largely unknown politician.Nonetheless, Trippe enrolled the interests of the State Department to ensure commercial advantage over SCADTA, which was achieved through the evocation of national security issues to prohibit foreign powers from flying over the Panama Canal.The fact that Trippe went on to ('secretly') purchase SCADTA and place the airline under the management of Erwin Balluder, a German-born airline executive suggests that Trippe had more commercial than political concerns with German influence.
seems at first glance to eschew the use of narrative, adopting a chronicle style through the detailing of Pan Am's expansion through the purchase, by Trippe, of existing airlines.However, much of the chronicles of Pan Am and other US companies are framed by a comedic tale xxvii of the maturing of U.S. multinational enterprise.Here Trippe's decisions are viewed as part of the growing influence of the US multinational corporation between 1914 and 1970.If there is an ontological disconnect between a historian's narrative and what it purports to represent in the past where does that leave us as scholars of the past, history, or the past-as-history?Our answer to this is to point to the relational aspects of the production/performance of narrative accounts.To start with the seemingly obvious, all historians, to a greater or lesser extent, draw on the work of other historians.Bender and Altschul, for example, cite Daley, and Josephson and draw on them to a considerable extentselecting storied accounts that fit with their somewhat tragic tale.Similarly, Daley cites Josephson and St. John Turner's (1976) pictorial history published seven years earlier.In comparison to Bender and Starting with flights from Miami to Havana in 1927, the airline grew rapidly over the next three years, with support from the State Department of the United States government.The interests of the State Department and those of Juan Trippe complemented each other in that