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Strategic management research has demonstrated that firm-specific resources can confer a distinct competitive advantage. This research, however, tends to assume that the resources are fixed and immutable and that they operate inside the organization. We offer a competing view in which resources are socially constructed and operate primarily on external stakeholders. Drawing from emerging research in social memory studies, we argue that historical narratives are an emerging means of socially constructing firm-specific social memory assets that can be used to create competitive advantage. We illustrate our argument through an analysis of how Tim Hor tons, a now iconic Canadian company, uses historical and tradition-based narratives to construct its brand identity.

This research commentary introduces historical consciousness to studying organizational change. Most theories of organizational change contain within them implicit assumptions about history.Made explicit, these assumptions tend to cluster into different models of change that vary by the assumed objectivity of the past and the associated malleability of the future. We explore and elaborate the implicit assumptions of history. We identify four implicit models of history in the change literature: History-as-Fact, History-as-Power, History-as-Sensemaking, and History-as-Rhetoric. We discuss the implications of theorizing organizational change from each of these views of history and outline future directions for studying change with a heightened understanding of history.

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.

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