Power, Archives and the Making of Rhetorical Organizational Histories: A stakeholder perspective

Abstract

We contribute to the rhetorical history concept by focusing on the corporate archive, a key source for constructing rhetorical histories. We propose a stakeholder perspective as a way to model the constellation of power and interests around the corporate archive, identifying four key stakeholder groups: owners; archivists; historians; and audiences. Recent work has problematized the rhetorical history concept, arguing that rhetorical histories are more unstable and harder to control by managers than suggested by earlier work. This paper contributes by exploring the corporate archive as a source of contestation shaped by the varying degrees of power and interest held by key stakeholders. We propose a simple stakeholder perspective on the corporate archive before applying it to four case studies. Application allows us to refine this approach by revealing the interplay of forces around the corporate archive in relation to the construction of rhetorical history.

Organizational Memory Studies

“…For instance, others have explained how the tobacco industry attempted to erase the harmful effects of smoking from the public’s collective consciousness (Coraiola & Derry, 2020). Similarly, Popp and Fellman (2020) examine how power and interests differ within corporate archives according to which organizational stakeholder claim is examined. The authors show that archive owners (often corporations and the top management teams that lead them) have the power to control these archives yet there is often little interest in exerting this control.…”

Talking About (My) Generation: The Use of Generation as Rhetorical History in Family Business

“…We paid attention to different sources which addressed the same issue or referred to each other, showcasing the development of the actors’ thoughts or their differing interpretations of events. When critically reviewing the existing sources, we departed from the assumption that the Bagel entrepreneurs or the chief secretary may have had strategic or practical reasons for keeping some sources and omitting others (Decker, 2013; Popp & Fellman, 2020). We, therefore, triangulated between the archival records, contemporary published accounts, and secondary literature to multiply perspectives (Kipping et al, 2014).…”

Business as service? Human Relations and the British interwar management movement

“…A key feature of contextually informed historical research is the gathering of primary data from documents and oral histories that might cast fresh light on the power-laden processes implicated in changing societal and organizational realities (Popp and Fellman, 2020). As Cooke (1999: 83) asserts, ‘Historiographical processes, the way history comes to be written, the choices made in selecting and ignoring past events, are shaped by prevailing, albeit competing, societal power relations and their associated ideologies.’ Returning to primary archival documents allows for the possibility of their reappraisal in accordance with changing societal relations and ideologies.…”