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A growing body of research on how organizations engage with their histories has shown that organizational members revisit history in the light of present-day concerns to inspire or legitimize future courses of action. Studies of the processes through which organizational history is brought to bear on the present and future, however, remain rare. To uncover the processes and practices through which organizational members systematically engage with history, we investigate uses of material memory in four corporate museums. Our analysis uncovers three distinct modes of engagement, reflecting different temporal perspectives on organizational identity, involving different cross-temporal interpretative processes, and influencing action in different ways. Our theoretical insights have significant implications not only for understanding the use of history in organizations, but also for research on organizational identity and organizational memory.
Ravasi et al. (Mon,) studied this question.