History has long been recognized as a strategic and organizational resource. However, until recently, the advantage conferred by history was attributed to a firm's ability to accumulate heterogeneous resources or develop opaque practices. In contrast, we argue that the advantage history confers on organizations is based on understanding when the knowledge of the past is referenced and the reasons why it is strategically communicated. We argue that managers package this knowledge in historical narratives to address particular organizational concerns and audiences. As well, we show that different historical narratives are produced with the goal of achieving different organizational outcomes. The success of an organization is thus dependent on the ability of its managers to skilfully develop historical narratives that create a strategic advantage.

Research Summary The capacity to manage history is an important but undertheorized component of dynamic capabilities. We argue that the capacity to manage the interpretation of the past, in the present for the future, is a critical ability that informs a firm's ability to successfully enact changes needed to adapt to disruptive technology. We identify and elaborate three specific cognitive interpretations of history—history as objective fact, history as interpretive rhetoric, and history as imaginative future‐perfect thinking—and demonstrate how these different views of history can be mobilized by managers to sense, seize, and reconfigure around opportunities made available by understanding the invisible thread of technology. Managerial Summary History is typically understood to be a constraint on a manager's ability to effect change. A firm's past is assumed to create inertia in routines and structures that compromise a firm's ability to change. We show how acquiring a broader understanding of the role of history can improve a manager's ability to enact organizational change. Studying the evolution of technology over time and across products allows managers to sense opportunities created by technological change. Using different narrations of the past as continuous or disruptive can improve a manager's ability to motivate or resist change. Using the past to construct convincing scenarios of the future, managers can enroll key stakeholders in the industry to support a strategic direction that advances the firm's strategic goals.

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This paper provides an overview and discussion of the rapidly growing literature on Organizational Memory Studies (OMS). We define OMS as an inquiry into the ways that remembering and forgetting shape, and are shaped by, organizations and organizing processes. The contribution of this article is threefold. We briefly review what we understand by organizational memory and explore some key debates and points of contestation in the field. Second, we identify four different perspectives that have been developed in OMS (functional, interpretive, critical and performative) and expand upon each perspective by showcasing articles published over the past decade. In particular, we examine four papers previously published in Organization Studies to show the distinctiveness of each perspective. Finally, we identify a number of areas for future research to facilitate the future development of OMS.

ResumoEste ensaio apresenta estrutura analítica que busca conciliar elementos da agência e do contexto na análise de processos de mudança institucional. A estrutura está baseada na articulação entre as abordagens do institutional work e da mudança institucional gradual. Ambas as abordagens foram criadas como alternativas a perspectivas que enfatizavam demasiadamente elementos estruturais (como a path dependence theory) ou a ação (como o empreendedorismo institucional). No entanto, apesar dos ganhos analíticos que ambas trouxeram para o estudo da mudança institucional, ainda mantêm fortes vínculos com os pressupostos das tradições de pesquisa das quais emergiram. Uma aproximação entre tais esquemas teóricos permite maior rigor para investigar processos de mudança institucional e possibilita aos pesquisadores maior consciência sobre os pressupostos inerentes a cada perspectiva, assim como incentiva a busca por abordagens que encadeiem elementos capazes de prover explicação adequada para a manutenção e a mudança institucionais. No centro dessa proposta, encontra-se a busca por entender a dinâmica da vida institucional. O contexto institucional possui certo nível de plasticidade e pode ser modificado de acordo com a disponibilidade de práticas, significados e recursos. A efetivação desse potencial de mudança está relacionada à capacidade dos atores, seus níveis de reflexividade institucional e munificência de recursos. As práticas de criação, manutenção e dirupção das instituições em determinado contexto serão, portanto, resultado da interação entre as características do contexto institucional (nível de plasticidade institucional) e dos tipos de atores sociais (nível de discricionariedade institucional).

Rhetorical history has emerged as a useful theoretical construct that bridges the long recognized gap between historical and organizational scholarship. Despite its growing popularity, the precise nature of rhetorical history as a construct, its scope conditions, and its utility in resolving critical issues in historical organizational analysis remains unclear. This paper addresses these issues. We define rhetorical history and contextualize the construct by elaborating its relationship to associated concepts like collective memory, rhetoric, and narrative. We ground the construct by reviewing literature that has applied rhetorical history in both theory and empirical research. Our inductive review identifies four recurring themes in which rhetorical history is used to construct perceptions of; (a) continuity and discontinuity, (b) similarity and difference, (c) winners and losers, and (d) morality and immorality. We conclude with a discussion of how rhetorical history is an essential mechanism of institutional work.

We present an exploratory analysis of historical narratives and data covering 200 years of beer brewing in the Canadian province of Ontario. These data are used to illuminate the process of collective identity emergence in established organizational fields. We argue that established fields are typically littered with identity remnants from ancestral organizations and related institutional configurations that can facilitate the successful emergence of new collective identities. In our analysis we first show how multiple identity elements fell by the wayside as the beer brewing field matured and settled on a corporate path. We go on to detail how some of these identity elements were subsequently recovered during the recent decades which marked the successful emergence and proliferation of craft beer brewing. Our study has implications for research on collective identity and organizational legacy, and we stress the importance of taking a historical lens for understanding present day phenomena.

Organizations commonly regard memories of pain and destruction as being unwanted. In this article, we consider the largely undertheorized potential that painful pasts can have for building a mnemonic community. We draw primarily on oral history interviews to explore how Martin Litton and Grand Canyon Dories use sensory, discursive, and material-discursive modalities to convert painful memories into mnemonic resources through the performance of three practices: sensitizing, retelling, and reincarnating. Their aim was to protect the Grand Canyon for future generations. We advance research on organizational uses of the past by theorizing how painful memories can be converted into mnemonic resources. Specifically, we underscore the untapped potential of organizations repackaging history-at-large to curate experiences of the past using combinations of semiotic modalities and remembering practices. We call this multimodal remembering. We also contribute to research on place by illustrating how destroyed natural wonders that no longer exist in their geological corporeal form can be transposed across time and space and become re-embodied in new phantasmatic forms.