Organizational Identity and Memory

A Multidisciplinary Approach

Andrea Casey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138947948
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317365143
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Organizational Identity and Memory analyzes the relationship between organizational identity and organizational memory, in particular history and commemoration. The goal is to further our understanding of the role of this relationship in processes critical to today's organizations: the evolution of organizational identity, the creation and use of organizational memory, organizational learning and change, and employee identification with organizations.

The literature on organizational memory and organizational identity has developed independently and at times in separate disciplines. Scholars have debated whether organizational identity is mutable or enduring. In this debate, organizational history, a form of organizational memory, has been a key factor, but neither side of the debate has pursued indepth the well-developed literature on collective memory to understand this relationship and its impact on organizational identity. Organizational memory defined as commemoration and history has been connected to different forms of identity, both national and organizational, but this relationship and its impact on organizational memory processes has not been explored.

Organizational Identity and Memory takes a multidisciplinary approach to explore and articulate the dynamic relationship between organizational identity and memory, drawing on work from anthropology, history, organizational studies, and sociology. A multidisciplinary theoretical framework for future research on organizational identity and memory is presented. Implications for managers are discussed with engaging insights from organizational research and practices in creating corporate museums, galleries, visitor centers, and other displays of this relationship.

Part I
The Concepts

1 Organizational and Collective Memory

Prior to Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) seminal work on organizational memory, the term organizational memory was occasionally referenced in the organizational studies literature but was not explored in depth. For example, Weick (1979) referenced organizational memory in relationship to organizational learning. Organizational memory was also noted in terms of corporate history, with Smith and Steadman (1981) highlighting the role of corporate history in an organization’s adaptation to change and the value of understanding the past, including corporate heritage and traditions, in relationship to present actions. Lawrence (1984) took a different perspective, emphasizing the value of a historical perspective in examining organizational studies phenomena.

Since Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) work, researchers (Casey & Olivera, 2007) have asserted the importance of multidisciplinary theorizing and empirical work in the exploration of organizational memory, yet most of the work on organizational memory since Walsh and Ungson (1991) has taken either a managerial functionalist approach (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; Rowlinson, Booth, Clark, Delahaye, & Procter, 2010) or has drawn extensively from psychological theories of individual memory (Sorensen, 2014). Sociological theory on collective memory and related components of memory such as commemoration and history (Halbwachs, 1950/1980; Schwartz, 2000, 2005) have begun to emerge as a theoretical foundation for exploring organizational memory as a collective process (Casey, 1997; Feldman & Feldman, 2006; Ocasio, Mauskapf, & Steele, 2016) and, in connection to organizational history, providing a theoretical lens upon which to build theory and research on organizational memory as a collective process. In particular, this work has served to help understand the processes of commemoration or remembering together, as well as how organizations use their history to sustain, change, or manage their organizational identity (Hatch & Schultz, 2017; Schultz & Hernes, 2013). These theories have also surfaced factors that influence memory and its relationship to identity. In addition, they take into consideration the social and historical nature of organizational memory (Rowlinson et al., 2010). For example, the sociological lens suggests the important role of power in recollection of past events and commemoration (Nissley & Casey, 2002; Sorensen, 2014).

This chapter first provides the theoretical foundations and definitions of organizational memory from an organizational studies perspective, presenting two literature reviews on organizational memory in organizational studies and use of the concept in discussions of knowledge management and organizational learning. The next section shows how the organizational studies literature began to draw on the theoretical lens of collective memory. The chapter then turns to the scholarship on collective memory across the social sciences, including anthropology, history, and sociology. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the factors that influence organizational and collective memory.

Organizational Memory

Walsh and Ungson (1991) were the first to review the literature on organizational memory. They defined organizational memory as “stored information from an organization’s history that can be brought to bear on present decisions” (p. 61) and noted that although the term was foundational in theoretical domains, including organizational learning and information systems, the concept was “fragmented and underdeveloped” (p. 57). In the more than 25 years since this article was published, organizational memory has continued to serve as a foundation for theorizing and research in areas such as organizational learning (Anderson & Sun, 2010; Argote, 2013; Argote & Miron-Spektor, 2011; Casey, 1997; Santos-Vijande, López-Sánchez, & Trespalacios, 2012; Schwandt & Marquardt, 2000; Schwartz, 1997), organizational forgetting (Casey & Olivera, 2011; Lopez & Sune, 2013; Mena, Rintamaki, Fleming, & Spicer, 2016), knowledge management (Barros, Ramos, & Perez, 2015), and, to a lesser extent, organizational identity (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; Casey, 2010; Casey & Byington, 2013; Schultz & Hernes, 2013), as well as the more recent work on historicizing organizations (Hatch & Schultz, 2017).

Since 1991, there have been three literature reviews on organizational memory: those of Casey and Olivera (2007) and Anderson and Sun (2010) in organizational studies and a third by Barros et al. (2015) in the information systems literature. This chapter presents an overview of Walsh and Ungson’s work (1991), followed by a discussion of the major findings from the two literature reviews in organizational studies and a synopsis of the review of Barros et al. (2015). This serves as a foundation for an analysis of the more recent work on organizational memory in organizational studies, particularly the turn toward history and historicizing (Hatch & Schultz, 2017) work in organizations since 2010.

The Seminal Text of Walsh and Ungson

In their 1991 article entitled “Organizational Memory,” Walsh and Ungson (1991) noted that as early as 1979, Weick referenced the importance of organization memory in processes such as organizational learning as well as organizing as a whole and indicated that memory could constrain and enable organizational actions in the present and future. They acknowledged that at that time organizational memory was thought to have components of “mental and structural artifacts” (Walsh & Ungson, 1991, p. 58), from cause maps and standard operating procedures to memories and the history of past events. They also referenced Yates’s (1990) historical work that provides an analysis of the evolution of one aspect of organizational memory: the written record and how it evolved from 1850 to 1920.

Walsh and Ungson (1991) surfaced the issues involved in drawing from psychological definitions of memory and the work on memory that had been conducted in biology and neurology to inform memory at the organizational level. Much of the work on organizational memory at that time treated it as a metaphor, and Walsh and Ungson (1991) acknowledged the construct validity, measurement, and consequentiality issues in employing concepts from one level of analysis to another. (See Morgeson and Hofmann [1999] and Kozlowski and Klein [2000] for further exploration of issues in multilevel theorizing.)

Underlying their analysis of organizational memory, Walsh and Ungson (1991) made three assumptions: that organizations are (1) information processing systems obtaining data from their environments, (2) interpretation systems, and (3) “a network of intersubjectively shared meanings that are sustained” (p. 60) through language and social interaction. They defined organizational memory as “stored information from an organization’s history that can be brought to bear on present decisions” (Walsh & Ungson, 1991, p. 61) and conceptualized it in terms of retention facilities or bins, which included individuals, culture, transformations, organizational structures, ecology, and external archives. They proposed processes associated with the functioning of organizational memory (acquisition, retention, and retrieval) and the types of knowledge (what, why, who, etc.) in each retention bin.

In acquisition processes, Walsh and Ungson (1991) acknowledged the difficulties organizations have in acquiring and storing information about decisions, actions, and consequences. Information can be ambiguous and incomplete, and organizational schemas or filters work to interpret this information. Similar issues were identified in the retention process. They proposed that memory is retained in different types of storage facilities, including individuals, cultures (that which is learned and transmitted), transformations, structures, ecology, and external archives, with different patterns of retention associated with different mechanisms. Retrieval processes focused on how information can be recovered through automatic and controlled processes. They proposed that schemata are involved in both automatic and controlled retrieval.

Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) propositions related to the use and misuse of memory suggested that organizational memory and history should be taken into account when decisions are made and in creating organizational change, as change is framed from the perspective of the past. Yet their propositions also acknowledged the time-consuming process of considering information from the past and how this process could take away from future actions. These processes are impacted by political action as well. One of the more important influences on these processes is the influence of the individual both in terms of tenure in the organization and continuity of this service.

Walsh and Ungson (1991) framed a research agenda to address the structure, process, and consequences of organizational memory, arguing that future research on organizational memory could inform our understanding of organizational change, design, and structure. Their perspective on organizational memory has been applied to a variety of organizational phenomena, including learning (Anderson & Sun, 2010; Argote, 1999), innovation (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997; Moorman & Miner, 1997), decision making (Loma, Larsen, & Ginsberg, 1997), and improvisation (Crossan, Cunha, Vera, & Cunha, 2005).

Literature Reviews on Organizational Memory in Organizational Studies

There have been two major reviews of the literature on organizational memory (Anderson & Sun, 2010; Casey & Olivera, 2003) in organizational studies. These reviews took different approaches to reviewing the literature since Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) seminal article on organizational memory. Casey and Olivera used the search term organizational memory, while Anderson and Son completed a citation analysis. Both reviews positioned the significance of their work based on the interest in and related citations of organizational memory since Walsh and Ungson, as well as its conceptual relevance for organizational learning (Anderson & Sun, 2010).

In Anderson and Sun’s (2010) citation and content analysis, they found that more than 300 articles had cited the original work by Walsh and Ungson (1991) by the end of 2006. Their analysis focused on those articles that had the largest number of citations of Walsh and Ungson, and they explored which assertions in the Walsh and Ungson article had been most cited and which ones had been the most critiqued. Anderson and Son addressed four research questions:

1. Who cites Walsh and Ungson (1991) most frequently (in terms of authors and fields), and how has the number of citations changed over time?
2. What content from Walsh and Ungson (1991) have subsequent authors retrieved?
3. How many citing authors are critical of claims made by Walsh and Ungson (1991), and what is the nature of these criticisms?
4. Which articles contain the greatest number of Walsh and Ungson (1991) citation contexts, and how have these works extended our understanding of organizational memory?
   (pp. 133–134)

The 301 cited articles were published in 105 distinct journals, with the most representative disciplines being management (43 journals) followed by information technology (36 journals). A wide range of disciplines were included, from medicine to information technology to marketing. Citations of the article continued to increase through 2006, the end of the timeframe for their research. The most widely cited claim from the 1991 work was the metaphor of organizational memory storage bins. The next most cited claim (with almost half the number of citations) was the use and misuse of memory (Anderson & Sun, 2010). The discussion of these claims was fairly superficial, with little extension of the concepts. Relatively few of the citations in the 301 articles were critical of Walsh and Ungson’s claims, with the few criticisms focusing on the storage bins approach, the lack of process or interconnectedness of the bins, and the minimal discussion of different forms of organizations (Anderson & Sun, 2010).

Despite the large number of citations of Walsh and Ungson (1991)—the article could be considered a “citation classic” (Anderson & Sun, 2010, p. 143)—most of the treatment of the knowledge claims was limited, and therefore Anderson and Sun (2010) concluded that “Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) work has had much less impact than its high citation count implies” (p. 142). At the same time, though, they concluded that Walsh and Ungson’s work “represents a milestone in our understanding of organizational memory” (Anderson & Sun, 2010, p. 143).

Casey and Olivera’s (2003) review of the organizational memory literature reached some similar conclusions. They reviewed the organizational memory literature from 1991 to 2002. Their primary conclusion was that although organizational memory was widely cited, it was mostly cited in a peripheral manner, and few studies had attempted to develop or empirically examine the concept. Progress had been made, though, in the theoretical development of the concept and in empirical research, with an emphasis on what has been learned about the functions and structure of organizational memory and, in practitioner work, related to knowledge management and the learning organization (e.g., Wexler, 2002). Similar to Anderson and Sun (2010), Casey and Olivera (2003) noted an increasing number of articles using the term through 2003, the end of their review period.

Casey and Olivera (2003) searched the term organizational memory in peer-reviewed articles in ProQuest; their search yielded 806 articles. After eliminating those in which organizational memory was used only in the references, they coded the remaining articles as either central, substantial, or peripheral. In 44 articles, organizational memory played a substantial role as a concept to develop propositions or to understand findings. Articles were coded as central if organizational memory was the topic or central construct in the article. Thirty-seven articles were coded as central. Twenty-four articles were empirical studies, of which most used qualitative methods. Articles in which organizational memory was an important theme mainly appeared in organizational theory or organizational behavior journals; a few were in information technology. They suggested that the large number of articles in which the construct has played a peripheral role indicates that the concept has sufficient intuitive appeal to become part of the academic and practitioner conversation in many diverse communities and disciplines. In addition, in most of the articles, including those that were coded substantial, there were many untested assumptions about the nature of organizational memory that were based on understanding of individual-level memory, with little concern for the challenges of theorizing across levels (Ackerman, 1996; Corbett, 2000; Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999).

Casey and Olivera (2003) analyzed the articles in relationship to the structure and function of organizational memory using Morgeson and Hofmann’s (1999) framework for collective concepts. Their analysis found that researchers primarily explored organizational memory in relationship functions such as decision making, learning, stability, adaptation, innovation, and improvisation. From a structure perspective, Casey and Olivera (2003) found that the literature began to move away from the original storage bin approach proposed by Walsh and Ungson to consider more emergent structures, including dispersed memory and microprocesses. Casey and Olivera (2003) proposed three future research directions: (1) the dynamic structure of memory emerging from patterns of i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Concepts
• Part II The Relationships Between Collective Memory and Identity
• Part III Theoretical Framework and Implications
• Index