Flights of fancy: myth, monopoly and the making of Pan American Airways
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Between 1927 and 1941 Pan American Airways (PAA) operated international flights from the USA with virtually no competition from US carriers. How PAA established and maintained its monopolistic position – by instrumentally creating a myth of “German threat” – and the implications for organizational theorizing and historiography is the proposed focus of this paper. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on a cultural theory approach to “doing history” and Barthes' 1972 notion of myth, this paper uses a critical hermeneutical exploration of the extensive PAA archive collection (at the Otto Richter Library of the University of Miami) and numerous secondary sources (e.g. various written histories). Following Barthes, the paper views myths as monolithic and authoritative historical constructions which conceal their ideological roots and instrumental conditions of creation. Through critical hermeneutics, the paper deciphers the myth of “German threat” by (re)contextualizing it and thus pluralizing history by showing how a threatening image of “foreign” and specifically “German” aviation operation in South America was instrumentally created to privilege PAA's operations and its close relationship with the US State Department. Findings Implications for the management theorist and historian as they pertain to a more fragile tone for “doing history” include the acknowledgement of history as multiple socially constructed interpretations of the past, an appreciation for histories that make their conditions of production transparent and the need for (re)writing histories that parade as authoritative monoliths. Originality/value The paper offers an empirical example of how an organization's instrumental use of myth facilitates manipulations of history in order to situate and secure the positioning and image of that organization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".