Organizational Cultures of Remembrance: Exploring the Relationships between Memory, Identity, and Image in an Automobile Company

Daniel Mai

Published by De Gruyter 2015

Organizational Cultures of Remembrance

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

Daniel Mai

Volume 21 in the series Media and Cultural Memory

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110420685

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Daniel Mai, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Acknowledgements Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	v
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
1. Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. A Cultural Perspective on Organizational Remembrance in Corporations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
3. Empirical Research Design Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
4. Audi Tradition in its Role as the Official Carrier of Organizational Remembrance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
5. Purposes and Cultural Forms of Organizational Remembrance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
6. Multiple Stakeholders of the Corporate Past Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	137
7. Organizational Remembrance as a Historical Process of Evolution and Differentiation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	182
8. The Emergence of Historical Consciousness among the Workforce Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	216
9. Construing Organizational Reality through Retrospection Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	248
10. Constructing Identities in Light of the Corporate Past Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
11. Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	304
12. Appendix Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	334
Primary Material Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	347
Academic Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	357
Subject index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	374

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Academics in cultural memory studies, organizational memory studies, organizational culture studies, business anthropology
Pages
- Front matter: 9
- Main content: 386
Keywords: Organizational memory; organizational identity; corporate history management; organizational ethnography

eBook

Published: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 9783110420685

Hardcover

Published: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 9783110425635