Organizational Cultures of Remembrance

Exploring the Relationships between Memory, Identity, and Image in an Automobile Company

Daniel Mai

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9783110425635
• eBook ISBN: 9783110420821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Social Sciences

In a business world predominantly oriented toward the future, it has paradoxically become ever more common that companies turn towards their pasts. This book empirically explores the phenomenon of organizational remembrance from a holistic cultural perspective. Based on a twelve-month ethnographic case study conducted at the headquarters of the German automobile company, AUDI AG, this study dissects the relationships between memory, identity, and image in a corporate setting. The greater aim in doing so is twofold: First, this study examines exactly why and how a company officially manages its past in terms of 'history' and 'tradition.' And second, this study scrutinizes what effect organizational remembrance has on the workforce – how it impacts their collective identification with a corporate community and influences their understanding of their daily working life. By investigating the interplay between different stakeholder groups, as well as their practices, media, mental models, and other vehicles of remembrance, an integrated account is offered which makes sense of the complex cultural forces at work in the corporate handling of the past, the present, and the future.

1 Introduction

In an increasingly fast-paced economy, many business organizations idolize innovativeness and the ability to foresee changes in the marketplace as key qualities in the competitive struggle for garnering profit. In this regard, the category of time is widely envisioned as a scarce and highly valuable resource which is integral to business. Time is measured, planned, wasted, saved, and accounted for (Hassard, 1996), which Benjamin Franklin’s (1748) well-known dictum “Remember that time is money” (as cited in Weinrich, 2008, p. 92) demonstrates.

When it comes to time modes, however, the past, the present, and the future are not on equal footing. Going hand in hand with “processes of acceleration” (Rosa, 2013, p. 17)1 that can be observed in various domains of life, modern management principles are built upon ideas of constant alertness and change. They create an environment permeated by an obsessive concern with the present and the future. These time modes appear to be forgeable and thus a calculable factor. The past, in contrast, is commonly ascribed the image of an inalterable monolith no longer worthy of concern. For instance, Burkard Sievers (2009), an organizational psychologist, makes the critical observation that most companies “focus primarily on the relatedness of the present to the future to come” (p. 27). Organizational sociologist Walther Müller-Jentsch (2003) proclaims that modern organizations are “as a matter of principle detached from tradition” (p. 17). Business historian Manfred Grieger (2007) asserts that “[d]ue to current market requirements, companies inevitably act above all as institutions of the present, which do not grant the past any overpowering significance, but which emphasize the opportunity of a new beginning” (pp. 211–212). And cultural theorist Dirk Baecker (1987) claims that the “social system of the economy” operates according to the “premise ‘bygones are bygones,’ systematically treating the past as irrelevant” (p. 519). The overwhelming impression one receives from these commentators is that the past is an utterly neglected topic in the business world.

1.1 When Business Organizations Remember their Past

Despite the prevalence of future-orientation, the phenomenon of “corporate amnesia” Kransdorff (1998, p. 1) – i.e. the blatant disregard of past experiences – does not always take hold in a business environment. Over the last decades it has become more common for business organizations to make statements about their past, cached in terms of ‘history’ and ‘tradition.’ The technology company Robert Bosch GmbH (2011), for instance, which is more than a century old, proclaims that “[f]rom the very beginning, the company’s history has been characterized by its innovative drive and social commitment” (para. 2). The fashion store Peek&Cloppenburg KG (2011) accentuates its “Hanseatic tradition,” declaring that “the qualities of the company are shaped by the attitudes and mind sets which were historically ascribed to the character of Hanseatic merchants” (para. 3). The pharmaceutical producer Merck & Co (2011), on the other hand, states that it “ha[s] a long and rich history of working to improve people’s health and well-being” (para. 2), which makes them “proud of our past” (para. 3). Mercedes-Benz celebrates itself as the “inventor of the automobile” with a “unique tradition” (Daimler AG, 2011b, para. 3). And the automotive supplier ZF Friedrichshafen AG (2011) proclaims that “[o]ur history is an important pillar of our identity; it makes ZF distinctive” (para. 3). In all of these cases, business organizations make implicit and explicit identity claims by establishing a link between the past and the present. Seeking historical legitimization for their contemporary conduct, they claim to possess long-standing experience and expertise. They thus confer upon their organizations a sense of stability, perseverance, and tenacity, and imply a uniqueness of identity based on their past as a means of standing out in the marketplace.

References to the corporate past are not restricted to verbal formulations of corporate identity claims, though. The past can be represented through a vast range of different forms: Companies publish elaborate corporate history books, as is the case with Zeppelin GmbH (Seibold, 2009) or Hugo Boss AG (Köster, 2011). They publicly celebrate anniversaries, as computer giant IBM (Forbes, 2011, August 6) or automaker Chevrolet (New York Times, 2011, October 21) demonstrated with their centennials in 2011. They establish corporate history departments that call themselves “both the memory and the soul” of the company (BMW Group Classic, 2012, para. 2). Car manufacturers, in particular, publicly celebrate their portfolio of vintage motor vehicles as a continuous stream of innovations across time, as Daimler AG (2011a) so aptly demonstrates. The examples go on: companies install memorial plaques to commemorate deceased employees, as can be seen in the case of the finance group Lloyds TSB (Gough, 2004). Company museums, like the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany (Vitra Design Stiftung gGmbH, 2011), are sometimes erected, and historical exhibitions, such as the “Milestones of refreshment” exhibition at the “World of Coca Cola” visitor center in Atlanta, USA (The Coca Cola Company, 2011), put together. Companies set up historical archives, as with the bank Wells Fargo (Niebuhr Eulenberg, 1984), and they launch historical associations dedicated to research of the corporate past, such as Deutsche Bank AG (2009) with its Historische Gesellschaft der Deutschen Bank e.V. (cf. Schug, 2003).

These examples suggest that there are some business organizations that do not live exclusively in the “extended present” (Sievers, 2009, p. 27). On the contrary, these cases feature organizations that elect to represent and instrumentalize their past. According to Charlotte Linde (2009), these companies have found “ways of working the past: invoking and retelling parts of the past for present purposes” (p. 3). Speaking in more metaphorical terms, these companies have acquired a ‘memory.’

A new field of research called organizational memory studies devoted to scrutinizing this greater phenomenon has slowly emerged in the last decades (e.g., Casey, 1997; Casey & Olivera, 2011; Rowlinson, Booth, Clark, Delahaye, & Procter, 2010; Walsh & Ungson, 1991). Likewise, the field of organizational culture and organizational identity studies is tentatively becoming more interested in the role a shared past plays in creating a community among the workforce (e.g., Schultz & Hernes, 2010, 2013). In the more practically oriented corporate sphere, on the other hand, a handful of marketing scholars are touting the merits of history management for image building in the external sphere (e.g., Danilov, 1992; Diez & Tauch, 2008; Foster, Suddaby, Minkus, & Wiebe, 2011; Herbrand & Röhrig, 2006; Schug, 2003). All of these fields are operating with various conceptions of ‘memory’ in organizations while covering different sub-sets of the same problem – namely how and why organizations deal with experiences of the past in the present. Depending on their scope, numerous scholars have approached this question from different angles, and they offer a correspondingly disparate array of explanations. An interdisciplinary discourse about the relationships between memory, identity, and image in business organizations which attempts to synthesize multiple perspectives does not yet exist.

This book is essentially driven by the urge to fill the concrete research gaps identified in a preliminary inquiry that provided a detailed overview of existing literature (viz., Mai, 2009). While these research-worthy gaps will be further discussed in chapter 2, a short rendition provides at least an initial idea of this book’s starting point.

While many individuals in the western world spend a significant amount of time and energy in companies, empirical evidence of how exactly organizational memory is constituted and operates in everyday practice is extremely scarce (Rowlinson et al., 2010). The role of organizational retrospection in real-life business remains untested, and one can, at best, only form hypotheses with regards to its functioning. Likewise, claims about the effective coordination and control of memory in a corporate setting can be taken with a grain of salt as long as proclamations of cause and effect are not backed up by proper empirical research.

Second, memory is often treated as something an organization has rather than what it does (Casey & Olivera, 2011). This approach reflects a strong degree of actor-detachment, because it disregards human interactions occurring in the social sphere of the organization. In reply to this critique, Feldman and Feldman (2006) suggest a major theoretical shift to “organizational remembering” as a “collective, historically and culturally situated practice” (p. 880) – an idea that this study picks up and implements. However, more pronounced insights into the cultural fabric, social nature, and multiplicity of such practice(s) are, in large part, missing.

Third, the majority of scholarly inquiries do not differentiate between the formal side of what is officially recollected in the name of the company and the informal side that occurs on the ordinary member level. How employees are themselves influenced by the company in their historical thinking and the conceptualization of an organizational self through organizational remembrance is an under-researched topic – especially when it comes to the internal impact of corporate history departments and museums (cf. Nissley & Casey, 2002). In consequence, the contingencies inherent to the formal and informal dimensions are virtually unknown.

Fourth, scholarly inquiries into organizational memory are often limited to physical knowledge storage systems such as archives (e.g., Weaver & Bishop, 1974), or – in the rare case that the social component of human interaction is taken into consideration – to the aspect of oral narratives solicited from employees (e.g., Linde, 2009). The existence of other cultural forms in the material, social, and mental dimensions of organizat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Cultural Perspective on Organizational Remembrance in Corporations
• 3 Empirical Research Design
• 4 Audi Tradition in its Role as the Official Carrier of Organizational Remembrance
• 5 Purposes and Cultural Forms of Organizational Remembrance
• 6 Multiple Stakeholders of the Corporate Past
• 7 Organizational Remembrance as a Historical Process of Evolution and Differentiation
• 8 The Emergence of Historical Consciousness among the Workforce
• 9 Construing Organizational Reality through Retrospection
• 10 Constructing Identities in Light of the Corporate Past
• 11 Conclusion
• 12 Appendix
• Endnotes
• Primary Material Cited
• Academic Works Cited
• Subject index