In this paper, we explain how defunct organizations influence the communities they leave behind through ongoing processes of communal memory work, a twofold social process through which members of collectives develop shared memories of a defunct organization and behaviorally engage with its mnemonic traces. We explore how individuals’ shared construal of their environment shapes their emotional orientation towards their past, which in turn gives rise to particular forms of memory work. We further show how communal memory work influences changes in an organization’s role in a community’s identity and members’ construal of their environment. We develop our theory through an analysis of a case study of South Bend, Indiana, in the 54 years following the closure of the Studebaker Corporation’s automotive factory in 1963. We close by discussing the implications of this work for memory scholarship.

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This Incubator complements Kerr's classic writing, extended by recent articles by Wright and colleagues, "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B." Here, we focus on the potentially even more extreme, self-sabotaging folly of punishing A while hoping for A (i.e., the behaviors and outcomes organizations want most).

While scholars have explained how organizational imprints evolve, they have yet to explore how newcomers discern the meaning of existing imprints. Drawing on a field study of a home healthcare agency, we demonstrate how newcomers’ discovery of imprints spurs an assessment process through which they personalize the imprints before enacting them through task performance, affective commitment, and preferences for selection. We discuss the implications of our work for scholars seeking to better understand the cognitive and social-cognitive processes underlying newcomers’ experiences with organizational imprints and the ways in which such engagement might shape their persistence.

Background: Feelings of ownership play an important role in experiential education and are associated with several positive outcomes. However, researchers have yet to explore the dynamic nature of psychological ownership and its antecedents in experiential courses from the perspectives of the students. Purpose: The authors used the lens of psychological ownership theory to explore the experiences of students in an experiential learning setting. Methodology/Approach: In this study, the authors used repeated waves of semi-structured interviews in a two-semester classroom-as-organization (CAO). They then used a five-step process to identify themes describing the students’ experience. Findings/Conclusions: The authors found that different antecedents to psychological ownership worked together at different points in the development of the CAO, that students did not want full control of the CAO (despite their feelings of ownership toward it), and that students anticipated feelings of ownership that persisted after the class had ended. Implications: Educators may struggle to identify the level of control students’ need in a CAO to reap the benefits of the experience. Persistent feelings of ownership after experiential learning ends can contribute to student development.