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.
This essay encourages scholars of Management and Organization Studies (MOS) to critically reflect on how Indigenous peoples and their knowledges have been, and continue to be, systemically discriminated against. This discrimination is the result of colonization; it has deeply impacted and continues to affect which knowledges and practices are valued and embraced. The impact of colonization is mirrored in MOS via processes and actions within the academic setting and our business schools. The result is the continued marginalization of Indigenous peoples and their knowledges. We propose a shift in how MOS scholars approach research in relation to non-western societies to counter, and hopefully end, these continued practices of discrimination in our business schools. Specifically, we argue that demarginalizing Indigenous research in academia and going beyond ‘cosmetic indigenization’ in our business schools are new, collaborative ways of rethinking indigeneity and breaking down the current barriers in MOS that reinforce and perpetuate the systemic discrimination against Indigenous peoples, their knowledges, and practices.
Past research on organizational memory has mainly focused on the short term and the way information is acquired, retained, and retrieved. Instead, we argue that historical and long-term memory play an important role in organizations and we focus on the work of corporate historians and archivists in constructing long-term organizational memory. We analyzed the activities of corporate archivists and historians in eleven Fortune 500 firms. Our findings suggest that present strategic agendas drive mnemonic processes in organizations. In addition, longer-term memories offer richer possibilities for reinterpreting and reconstructing the past. Moreover, re-engagements generate additional layers of meaning that enrich and expand the possibilities of memory work for the future. We thus redefine organizational memory as an ongoing, dynamic process of memory work that encompasses both the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of information from the recent past and the recollection, reinterpretation, storytelling, and memorializing of issues and events from the longer past.
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