Book description
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.
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 1.1 When Business Organizations Remember their Past
- 1.2 Aims, Approach, and Structure
- 2 A Cultural Perspective on Organizational Remembrance in Corporations
- 2.1 Key Qualities of Modern Business Organizations and a Spotlight on Cultural Phenomena
- 2.2 Identity and Image in Organizations as Cultural Categories
- 2.3 Memory and Remembrance in Organizations
- 2.4 Organizational Cultures of Remembrance as a Conceptual Nexus
- 3 Empirical Research Design
- 3.1 Description of the Fieldwork Setting at the Time of Investigation
- 3.2 A Compact History of AUDI AG
- 3.3 Mix of Qualitative Methods in Organizational Ethnography
- 3.4 Fieldwork as a Social Process
- 4 Audi Tradition in its Role as the Official Carrier of Organizational Remembrance
- 4.1 The Corporate History Department in Relation to the Company
- 4.2 Formalized Areas of Tradition Work and Structures
- 4.3 Remembering the Corporate Past through Thematic Lenses
- 4.4 Short Summary
- 5 Purposes and Cultural Forms of Organizational Remembrance
- 5.1 Retaining Physical Proof of One’s Existence
- 5.2 Legal Protection of Trademark Rights
- 5.3 Historical Accountability
- 5.4 Corporate Identity Construction in Public Relations
- 5.5 Brand Identity Construction in Marketing
- 5.6 Direct Economic Utilization
- 5.7 Satisfaction of Entertainment Demands
- 5.8 Short Summary
- 6 Multiple Stakeholders of the Corporate Past
- 6.1 Internal Stakeholders
- 6.2 Semi-internal Stakeholders
- 6.3 External Stakeholders
- 6.4 Network of Remembrance, Collaboration, and Conflict
- 6.5 Short Summary
- 7 Organizational Remembrance as a Historical Process of Evolution and Differentiation
- 7.1 The Default Mode of Organizational Forgetting
- 7.2 Phase One: Remembering a Little and Forgetting a Lot
- 7.3 Phase Two: Gathering and Protecting
- 7.4 Phase Three: Going Public on a Grand Scale
- 7.5 Phase Four: Hitting the Apex
- 7.6 The Economic Cycle of Organizational Remembrance and Beneficial Factors Advancing the ‘Tradition Cause’
- 7.7 Short Summary
- 8 The Emergence of Historical Consciousness among the Workforce
- 8.1 Historical Consciousness as a Member’s Mental Competence
- 8.2 Factors Influencing the Development of Historical Consciousness
- 8.3 Short Summary
- 9 Construing Organizational Reality through Retrospection
- 9.1 Explaining the Reasons for Contemporary Market Conditions
- 9.2 Tracing the Roots of Common Working Practices
- 9.3 Justifying the Existence of Corporate Conflicts
- 9.4 Evaluating the Quality of Corporate Life
- 9.5 Short Summary
- 10 Constructing Identities in Light of the Corporate Past
- 10.1 Identifying with Contemporary Business Success
- 10.2 Processing Changes in Brand Image
- 10.3 Evoking a Positive Organizational Identity
- 10.4 Achieving Concreteness of Identity
- 10.5 Coping with Identity Threats
- 10.6 Short summary
- 11 Conclusion
- 11.1 Review and Discussion of Key Empirical Insights
- 11.2 Implications for Managerial Practice
- 11.3 Generalizability and Limitations of this Empirical Study
- 11.4 Issues for Future Research & Outlook
- 12 Appendix
- 12.1 Research Opportunities and Sampling of Respondents
- 12.2 Supporting Material for Fieldwork
- Endnotes
- Primary Material Cited
- Academic Works Cited
- Subject index
Product information
- Title: Organizational Cultures of Remembrance
- Author(s):
- Release date: May 2015
- Publisher(s): De Gruyter
- ISBN: 9783110420821
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