Narratives and Memory.pdf

Organization http://org.sagepub.com/

Narratives and memory in organizations Michael Rowlinson, Andrea Casey, Per H. Hansen and Albert J. Mills Organization 2014 21: 441 DOI: 10.1177/1350508414527256 The online version of this article can be found at: http://org.sagepub.com/content/21/4/441

Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Organization can be found at: Email Alerts: http://org.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://org.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://org.sagepub.com/content/21/4/441.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Jun 8, 2014 What is This?

Downloaded from org.sagepub.com by guest on August 31, 2014

527256

research-article2014

ORG0010.1177/1350508414527256OrganizationRowlinson et al.

Editorial

Narratives and memory in organizations

Organization 2014, Vol. 21(4) 441–446 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1350508414527256 org.sagepub.com

Michael Rowlinson

Queen Mary University of London, UK

Andrea Casey

George Washington University, USA

Per H. Hansen

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Albert J. Mills

Saint Mary’s University, Canada

Abstract Organizations remember through narratives and storytelling. The articles in this Special Issue explore the interface between organization studies, memory studies, and historiography. They focus on the practices for organizational remembering. Taken together, the articles explore the similarities and differences between ethnographic and historical methods for studying memory in organizations, which represents a contribution to the historic turn in organization studies. Keywords Ethnography, historiography, history, narrative, organizational memory

Knowingly or unknowingly, and to varying degrees, organizations continually construct their cultures and identities through memory and history (Linde, 2009). Organizations make sense of the present, creating new knowledge, but also consigning other knowledge to oblivion, through narratives of their past. The strategic use of history, or ‘rhetorical history’ (Suddaby et al., 2010), is Corresponding author: Michael Rowlinson, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK. Email: [email protected]


442

Organization 21(4)

increasingly recognized as significant in organization theory, as well as marketing, where heritage often constitutes a component of corporate brands (Hansen, 2010; Urde et al., 2007). The process of remembering and forgetting is inevitably selective, whether conscious or unconscious, as organizations continually make and remake their history, lest others create it for them (Hegele and Kieser, 2001). Organizations are enabled and constrained by narratives of their past (Hansen, 2007), with potentially profound implications for cultural change as organizations can be locked into the grand narratives of nations and capitalism. The concept of organizational memory has been taken up by the knowledge management and story consulting fads, where, as Boje (2008) argues, stories, memory, and history are treated instrumentally, as ‘knowledge assets’ to be tapped into as and when required. As a result, the initial systematic formulation of organizational memory (Walsh and Ungson, 1991) has been widely cited in organization studies (Anderson and Sun, 2010), but rarely criticized (Casey and Olivera, 2011). However, as Casey (1997) pointed out, the problem with the dominant storage bin model of organizational memory is that collective memory is not like a book or a computer which can be retrieved at any time in the same form in which it was originally lodged. In the wider field of social memory studies, it is generally accepted that experiences are recreated or reconstructed rather than retrieved through memory. Social memory studies has expanded rapidly, with its own specialist journals (Hoskins et al., 2008) and edited collections (Olick et al., 2011), but it remains focused on the family, ethnicity, and nation as mnemonic communities, with relatively little regard for the way in which corporations have increasingly appropriated social memory. The articles in this Special Issue, therefore, are located at the interface of organization studies, memory studies, and historiography, with a focus on narratives of the past in organizations. As Adorisio (2014) proposes, the focus on narrative reconciles the various critiques of organizational memory studies (Nissley and Casey, 2002; Rowlinson et al., 2010) and integrates them around the concept of ‘organizational remembering’ (Feldman and Feldman, 2006). Each of the articles highlights the various practices for remembering in organizations. Cruz (2014) explains how, in the post-conflict context of Liberia, the alternative forms of organizing preferred by market women, in susu groups, which are a kind of rotating credit association, shaped their memories of trauma. Ybema (2014) demonstrates how organization members can construct a periodization which separates them from the past, through a practice that Ybema describes as ‘invented transitions’. As a play on ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992; Rowlinson and Hassard, 1993), the concept of invented transitions questions the implication that organization members invariably look to the past for continuity. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory (ANT), Humphries and Smith (2014) examine how an object, the Xerox 914 plain copier, can tell the official story of an organization. Decker (2014) considers corporate architecture itself, as well as the corporate commemorative events associated with particular buildings, as practices of organizational remembering. The most strategic practices for using the past are examined by Maclean et al. (2014), where at Procter & Gamble, archival sources, such as speeches by P&G senior executives, are kept and referred to as part of the organization’s sensemaking in the present. Taken together, one of the most interesting contributions of the articles in this special issue is in relation to the range of methods that can be used to study narrative and memory in organizations, in particular the relation between historical and ethnographic methods. Ybema demonstrates how historical and ethnographic methods can be combined for a case study of memory in an organization, whereas Humphries and Smith propose a methodological position in which narratives are ‘collected’ from nonhuman objects, such as the Xerox 914 copier. The other four articles can be divided according to their emphasis on either ethnographic (Musacchio Adorisio; Cruz) or historical approaches (Decker; Maclean, Harvey, Sillince, and Golant). It would be tempting to draw a simple distinction between ethnographic methods, involving some form of direct observation or


443

Rowlinson et al.

participation in an organization, and archival–historical methods. However, if we look more closely at how their research was actually conducted, these distinctions are less clear-cut. From the ethnographic side, Cruz’s ‘African feminist ethnography’ is predicated on an historical understanding of post-conflict Liberia, where ‘African’ signals the need for historical context and an appreciation of African heterogeneity. Musacchio Adorisio draws more explicitly on the methods of microhistory, derived from the work of historians such as Ginzburg (1992 [1976]), to trace ‘narrative fragments’ from interviews. Musacchio Adorisio sees a parallel between microhistory and Boje’s (2001) concept of antenarrative, in that both seek to explain the fragments that exist outside or before master narratives. Both Cruz and Musacchio Adorisio use ethnographic methods, not so much to recover the past itself, but to examine the practices and stories whereby the past is represented in memory. The interest in historical methods such as microhistory can be seen as an extension of the ‘historic turn’ in organization theory (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Wadhwani and Bucheli, 2014). In parallel with the historic turn in organization studies, there has also been a turn to organization theory in business history, and more specifically a turn toward culture and narrative (Rowlinson and Delahaye, 2009), which includes memory (Fridenson, 2008; Scranton and Fridenson, 2013). Whereas business history was once seen as a branch of economic history, subordinate to economic theory, leading business historians are increasingly concerned with culture and narrative representations of the past (Hansen, 2012; Popp, 2009), which leads toward an engagement with organization theory. As a business historian, Decker (2014) emphasizes the ethnographic aspects of doing archival research in Nigeria and Ghana, where her observations on the national archives building itself, and reflection on her own working conditions, clearly inform her interpretation of architecture and organizational remembering in West Africa. Maclean et al.’s (2014) working conditions during their research in the Procter & Gamble archives in Cincinnati were presumably more comfortable than Decker’s, but they acknowledge the inevitable ideological effect of the ambience they enjoyed. The point to emphasize here is that in both cases, Decker and Maclean et al.’s immersion in their archival sources also involved the kind of field trips and relationships of trust that organizational ethnography is more usually associate with (e.g. Yanow and Geuijen, 2009), rather than the desk-based research with readily available published texts that ethnographers might imagine historians doing (e.g. Van Maanen, 1988). Not only is the process of doing archival research more ethnographic than might be imagined, but Decker’s (2014) description of her research as ‘archival ethnography’ also refers to her interpretation of archival sources, which is informed in part by postcolonial theory (Decker, 2013; Spivak, 1988). If Decker’s research could be categorized as a form of ‘ethnographic history’, then Maclean et al.’s (2014) systematic document analysis veers toward the kind of replicable procedure associated with ‘serial history’ (Rowlinson et al., 2014), even though their theoretical interpretation of ideology and sensemaking ranges widely from Althusser to Weick. The engagement between business historians and organization theorists (Bucheli and Wadhwani, 2014) has highlighted the similarities and differences between alternative approaches to researching the past and representations of the past. The articles in this special issue extend that engagement specifically in relation to narrative and memory. Their theoretical orientations vary widely, but Humphries and Smith’s (2014) use of ANT is possibly more in line with what seems to be an emerging trend in organization studies for the interpretation of archival sources and the construction of archive themselves. Durepos and Mills (2012a, 2012b) have proposed a full-blown ANTiHistory as an alternative to conventional historiography, which they have applied to the history of the airline industry (Durepos et al., 2008). Other historically oriented organization theorists have invoked ANT to interpret archival sources, but with a lighter touch (e.g. Bruce and Nyland, 2011; Hassard, 2012). There is clearly much scope for further dialogue between historical and


444

Organization 21(4)

ethnographic researchers regarding their methodological and theoretical preferences for interpreting narrative and memory in organizations. References Adorisio, A. L. M. (2014) ‘Organizational Remembering as Narrative: ‘Storying’ the Past in Banking’, Organization 21(4): 463–76. Anderson, M. H. and Sun, P. Y. T. (2010) ‘What Have Scholars Retrieved from Walsh and Ungson (1991)? A Citation Context Study’, Management Learning 41(2): 131–45. Boje, D. M. (2001) Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Boje, D. M. (2008) Storytelling Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bruce, K. and Nyland, C. (2011) ‘Elton Mayo and the Deification of Human Relations’, Organization Studies 32(3): 383–405. Bucheli, M. and Wadhwani, R. D., eds (2014) Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press. Casey, A. (1997) ‘Collective Memory in Organizations’, in J. P. Walsh and A. S. Huff (eds) Organizational Learning and Strategic Management: Advances in Strategic Management, vol. 14, pp. 111–46. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Casey, A. J. and Olivera, F. (2011) ‘Reflections on Organizational Memory and Forgetting’, Journal of Management Inquiry 20(3): 305–10. Clark, P. and Rowlinson, M. (2004) ‘The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an “Historic Turn”?’, Business History 46(3): 331–52. Cruz, J. (2014) ‘Memories of Trauma and Organizing: Market Women’s Susu Groups in Postconflict Liberia’, Organization 21(4): 447–62. Decker, S. (2013) ‘The Silence of the Archives: Business History, Post-Colonialism and Archival Ethnography’, Management & Organizational History 8(2): 155–73. Decker, S. (2014) ‘Solid Intentions: An Archival Ethnography of Corporate Architecture and Organizational Remembering’, Organization 21(4): 514–42. Durepos, G. and Mills, A. J. (2012a) ‘Actor-Network Theory, ANTi-History and Critical Organizational Historiography’, Organization 19(6): 703–21. Durepos, G. and Mills, A. J. (2012b) ANTi-History: Theorizing the Past, History and Historiography in Management and Organization Studies. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Durepos, G., Mills, A. J. and Helms Mills, J. (2008) ‘Tales in the Manufacture of Knowledge: Writing a Company History of Pan American World Airways’, Management & Organizational History 3(1): 63–80. Feldman, R. M. and Feldman, S. P. (2006) ‘What Links the Chain: An Essay on Organizational Remembering as Practice’, Organization 13: 861–87. Fridenson, P. (2008) ‘Business History and History’, in G. Jones and J. Zeitlin (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Business History, pp. 9–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginzburg, C. (1992 [1976]) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (trans. J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hansen, P. H. (2007) ‘Organizational Culture and Organizational Change: The Transformation of Savings Banks in Denmark, 1965–1990’, Enterprise & Society 8(4): 920–53. Hansen, P. H. (2010) ‘Co-branding Product and Nation: Danish Modern Furniture and Denmark in the United States, 1940–1970’, in P. Duguid and T. S. Lopes (eds) Trademarks, Brands and Competitiveness, pp. 77–100. London: Routledge. Hansen, P. H. (2012) ‘Business History: A Cultural and Narrative Approach’, Business History Review 86(4): 693–717. Hassard, J. (2012) ‘Rethinking the Hawthorne Studies: The Western Electric Research in Its Social, Political and Historical Context’, Human Relations 65(1): 1431–61. Hegele, C. and Kieser, A. (2001) ‘Control the Construction of Your Legend or Someone Else Will—An Analysis of Texts on Jack Welch’, Journal of Management Inquiry 10(4): 298–309.


445

Rowlinson et al.

Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T., eds (1992) The Invention of Tradition (Canto Classics Series). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoskins, A., Barnier, A., Kansteiner, W., et al. (2008) ‘Editorial’, Memory Studies 1(1): 5–7. Humphries, C. and Smith, A. C. T. (2014) ‘Talking Objects: Towards a Post-social Research Framework for Exploring Object Narratives’, Organization 21(4): 477–94. Linde, C. (2009) Working the Past: Narratives and Institutional Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Maclean, M., Harvey, C., Sillince, J. A. A., et al. (2014) ‘Living up to the Past? Ideological Sensemaking in Organizational Transition’, Organization 21(4): 543–67. Nissley, N. and Casey, A. (2002) ‘The Politics of the Exhibition: Viewing Corporate Museums through the Paradigmatic Lens of Organizational Memory’, British Journal of Management 13(Special Issue): S35–46. Olick, J. K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, V. and Levy, D., eds (2011) The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Popp, A. (2009) ‘History, a Useful “science” for Management? A Response’, Enterprise & Society 10(4): 831–36. Rowlinson, M. and Delahaye, A. (2009) ‘The Cultural Turn in Business History’, Entreprises et Histoire 55: 90–110. Rowlinson, M. and Hassard, J. (1993) ‘The Invention of Corporate Culture—A History of the Histories of Cadbury’, Human Relations 46(3): 299–326. Rowlinson, M., Booth, C., Clark, P., et al. (2010) ‘Social Remembering and Organizational Memory’, Organization Studies 31(1): 69–87. Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J. and Decker, S. (2014) ‘Strategies for Organizational History: A Dialogue between Historical Theory and Organization Theory’, Academy of Management Review 39(3). DOI: 10.5465/amr.2012.0203. Scranton, P. and Fridenson, P. (2013) Reimagining Business History. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 271–313. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M. and Trank, C. Q. (2010) ‘Rhetorical History as a Source of Competitive Advantage’, in J. A. C. Baum and J. Lampel (eds) Globalization of Strategy Research, vol. 27, pp. 147–73. London: Emerald. Urde, M., Greyser, S. A. and Balmer, J. M. T. (2007) ‘Corporate Brands with a Heritage’, Journal of Brand Management 15(1): 4–19. Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wadhwani, R. D. and Bucheli, M. (2014) ‘The Future of the Past in Management and Organizational Studies’, in M. Bucheli and R. D. Wadhwani (eds) Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods, pp. 3–31. New York: Oxford University Press. Walsh, J. P. and Ungson, G. R. (1991) ‘Organizational Memory’, Academy of Management Review 16: 57–91. Yanow, D. and Geuijen, K. (2009) ‘Defining “organizational ethnography”: Selection Criteria’, in S. Ybema, D. Yanow, H. Wels, et al. (eds) Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life, pp. 253–59. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ybema, S. (2014) ‘The Invention of Transitions: History as a Symbolic Site for Discursive Struggles over Organizational Change’, Organization 21(4): 495–13.

Author biographies Michael Rowlinson is Professor of Organization Studies at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London. His work on the ‘historic turn’ in organization theory and organizational remembering has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Business History, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Enterprises et Histoire, Human Relations, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Management & Organizational History, Organization, and Organization Studies.


446

Organization 21(4)

Andrea Casey is Associate Professor of Human and Organizational Learning at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University, Washington, DC. She has written widely on organizational learning and memory in journals such as Management Learning, and she first drew attention to the limitations of the storage bin model of memory in a coauthored article for the British Journal of Management. She has presented papers on the relationship between collective memory and identity at conferences such as the Academy of Management. In addition, she has published work on the role of individual memory and identification processes in organizations. Per H. Hansen is Professor at the Centre for Business History, Copenhagen Business School. His research and teaching interests are in financial history, organizational culture and change, cultural branding, and modern design. Examples of his analysis of historical narratives have been published in Business History Review and Enterprise and Society. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, Stockholm School of Economics, Rutgers University, Harvard Business School, and Stern School of Business. He is currently working on an analysis of central bank cooperation during the international financial crisis in 1931. Albert J. Mills is Professor of Management and Director of the Sobey Doctoral Program in Management at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. His main research interests include gender and organizations, management and organizational history, historiography, and, more recently, the interface between gender, business, and history. He is the coauthor and coeditor of over 20 books, including Sex, Strategy and the Stratosphere: The Gendering of Airline Cultures Over Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and ANTiHistory: Theorizing the Past, History, and Historiography in Management and Organizational Studies (with Gabrielle Durepos, Information Age Publishing, 2012).
