From ‘History as Told’ to ‘History as Experienced’: Contextualizing the Uses of the Past

Abstract

Research has made great strides in understanding how and why organizational actors use the past. So far, scholars have largely focused the level of analysis on the organization, without exploring the intertwined nature of historical claim-making with the organizational field or society at large. This article extends the status quo by conceptualizing the role of context for organizational uses-of-the-past. It identifies three key aspects of context that shape how history contributes to the social construction of reality: the existence of multiple audiences, the landscape of pre-existing historical narratives and the experience of social practices giving credibility to historical claims. By analysing the historical case of German business in colonial India, the paper makes three broader claims that could move research toward a more contextualized conception of the uses-of-the-past: (i) historical claims are validated in a continuous dialogue with multiple audiences; (ii) they revise previously existing narratives by critiquing or ‘outpasting’, i.e. invoking earlier origins; (iii) they often result in ‘rhetorical frictions’ that require continuous and skilful history revisions to mitigate emerging conflicts in their reception. By contextualizing the uses-of-the-past in this way, the paper moves beyond ‘hypermuscular’ organizational actors bending history to their will and foregrounds the situated nature of historical rhetoric.

Rethinking history and memory in organization studies: The case for historiographical reflexivity

“…Both exemplars therefore employ archival sources and historical contextualization to challenge the 'hypermuscular' (Lubinski, 2018) depiction of the creators of Table 6. Historical organizational memory exemplars.…”

Organizational Memory Studies

“…In particular, we believe that it will be crucial for further theorizing for scholars to delineate and distinguish between these constructs. For example, rhetorical history (Suddaby, Foster & Quinn-Trank, 2010) is often discussed as both a historical narrative (i.e., Lubinski, 2018) and as a mnemonic trace (i.e., Oertel and Thommes, 2015). This imprecision suggests that there is still the need to clarify what history and memory look like in organizations and how this impacts organizational actions and decisions.…”

“…It is through these activities that memory is simultaneously brought to life and transformed. Lubinski’s (2018) analysis of the evolving historical narratives told by German companies in India provides an interesting example. Writing within the tradition of rhetorical history research, she uncovered the way a cherished past of an Aryan society was performed to bring together Germans and Indians into an imagined community (Anderson, 1983).…”

Context, time, and change: Historical approaches to entrepreneurship research

“…Microhistory emerged in the late 20th century as a methodological response to the limits of social, economic, and cultural history and their focus on broad social, economic, and cultural patterns (Iggers, 2005). Microhistorians argued that such work had lost sight of the actual people and events that constituted "lived experience" and failed to account for the emergent processes and mechanisms through which individuals interacted with and reconfigured their contexts (Lubinski, 2018). Their response was not to focus on studying specific historical actors and events uncritically, but to use the chance to focus in a detective-like way on clues that might be contextualized to generate new general insights (Decker, 2015;Hargadon, 2015).…”