‘Remembering as Forgetting’: Organizational commemoration as a politics of recognition

Abstract

This paper considers the politics of how organizations remember their past through commemorative settings and artefacts. Although these may be seen as 'merely' a backdrop to organizational activity, they form part of the lived experience of organizational spaces that its members enact on a daily basis as part of their routes and routines. The main concern of the paper is with how commemoration is bound up in the reflection and reproduction of hierarchies of organizational recognition. Illustrated with reference to two commemorative settings, the paper explores how organizations might perpetuate a narrow set of symbolic ideals attributing value to particular forms of organizational membership while appearing to devalue others. In doing so, they may communicate values that undermine attempts to achieve equality and inclusion. Developing a recognition-based critique of this process, the discussion emphasizes how commemorative settings and practices work to reproduce established patterns of exclusion and marginalization. To this end, traditional forms of commemorative portraiture that tend to close off difference are contrasted with a memorial garden, in order to explore the potential for an alternative, recognition-based ethics of organizational commemoration that is more open to the Other.

Organizational Memory Studies

“…Their critique, although not as comprehensive as some later investigations (e.g. Cutcher et al, 2019; Foroughi & Al-Amoudi, 2020), foreshadows a key discussion in future OMS research.…”

“…In-depth interviews can provide a way for capturing competing memories of shared pasts (e.g. Aeon & Lamertz, 2019) and can be particularly effective when combined with archival or ethnographic data, or exploration of physical sites (Cutcher et al, 2019; Decker, 2014). Ethnographic studies that combine a variety of different types of data can also provide highly informative research on OMS (Foroughi, 2020; Foroughi & Al-Amoudi, 2020).…”

“…Decker (2014) demonstrated how architecture matters for organizational remembering practices in her investigation of corporate buildings of banks and retailers in Nigeria and Ghana. Cutcher and colleagues (2019) also explain how certain types of organizational memories are generated and upheld through corporate portraits associated with power relations. In cases such as these, traces of the past become intertwined with mnemonic processes, resulting in significant roles for both in the production of organizational memory (Mena et al, 2016).…”

“…Cutcher, Dale and Tyler (2019) take a similar critical approach to memory when they examine the reproduction of extant power relationships and the dominant view of the past. Like Sørensen, they study the power of pieces of art and, more generally, material traces of memory (Nora, 1989).…”

The commemoration of death, organizational memory, and police culture

“…As such, little can currently be said about how death and its commemoration within policing become a part of “collective memory” that supports a group's shared identity and culture over time (Assmann, ; Halbwachs, ). Within an organization like the police department, such collective memory takes the form of “organizational memory”—the collectively stored information of an organization's unique history—that influences individuals’ perception, decision‐making, and the organization's culture (Walsh & Ungson, , p. 61; see also Cutcher, Dale, & Tyler, ). This organizational memory is stored within and shared among individuals that, in turn, deploy symbols, logics, and stories that reproduce the organization's collective memory and culture.…”