scholarly journals Intertextuality, Rhetorical History and the Uses of the Past in Organizational Transition

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (12) ◽  
pp. 1733-1755 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mairi Maclean ◽  
Charles Harvey ◽  
John A.A. Sillince ◽  
Benjamin D. Golant
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Strategic Change ◽  
Past Experience ◽  
Rhetorical History ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Organizational History ◽  
Organizational Transition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Invented Tradition

This paper draws upon archival and oral history research on organizational transition at Procter & Gamble (1950–2009), during which P&G evolved from a multinational to a global enterprise. Intertextuality, the ways in which texts appropriate prior works to produce new texts, illuminates the practical workings of rhetorical history, accentuating interpretive agency. The uses of the past at P&G involved an authorized historical account relating to socialization, invented tradition, and lessons from past experience, facilitating change within continuity. We show that in transforming from multinational to global enterprise, recognition of the value of history to strategy intensified, engendering rhetorically intense variations on time-honoured themes. Our main contribution to theory is to demonstrate how sensitivity to intertextuality casts light on the nature of organizational history as historically constructed through language, subject to the agency of skilful interpretive actors who engage in intertextual adaptation in pursuit of strategic change as purposes and contexts evolve.

scholarly journals Living up to the past? Ideological sensemaking in organizational transition

Organization ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mairi Maclean ◽  
Charles Harvey ◽  
John A. A. Sillince ◽  
Benjamin D. Golant
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Change ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Organizational History ◽  
Organizational Transition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Top Managers ◽  
Over Time

This article builds upon archival and oral-history research on organizational change at Procter & Gamble from 1930 to 2000, focusing on periods of transition. It examines historical narrative as a vehicle for ideological sensemaking by top managers. Our empirical analysis sheds light on continuities in the narratives they offer, through which the past emerges as a recurrent lever of strategic manoeuvres and re-orientations. This reveals that while organizational history is sometimes regarded as a strategic asset or intrinsic part of collective memory, it is also re-enacted as a shared heritage, implying responsibilities. Executives (re)interpret the past and author the future, maintaining the historical narrative while using interpellation to ensure ideological consistency over time. The interpellative power of rhetorical narrative helps to recast organizational members as participants in an ongoing drama. In this way executives claim their legitimate right to initiate and manage organizational transition.

Uncommon Grounds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.

Line on Fire

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Happymon Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Jammu And Kashmir ◽  
The Past

The India–Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has witnessed repeated ceasefire violations (CFVs) over the past decade. Indeed, with relations between India and Pakistan degrading, CFVs have gone up exponentially. These CFVs have the potential to not only begin a crisis but also escalate an ongoing one. To make things worse, in the event of major violations, political leadership on either side often engage in high-pitched rhetoric some of which even have nuclear undertones. Using fresh empirical data and oral history evidence, this book explains the causes of CFVs on the J&K border and establishes a relationship between CFVs and crisis escalation between India and Pakistan. In doing so, the book further nuances the existing arguments about the escalatory dynamics between the two South Asian nuclear rivals. Furthermore, the book explains ceasefire violations using the concept of ‘autonomous military factors’.

The theater of memory: Direct speech in Palestinian oral history

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-648
Author(s):  
Kobi Peled
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Main Thing ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
Do So

A striking feature of Palestinian oral history projects is the extensive use that interviewees make of direct speech to communicate their memories—especially those born before the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. They do so irrespective of whether or not they participated in or actually heard the dialogues they wish to convey. This article seeks to characterize and explain this phenomenon. In the interviews conducted by the author—an Arabic-speaking Jew—as well as in other projects, this mode of speech is marked by ease of transition from character to character and between different points in time. It clearly gives pleasure to those engaged in the act of remembering, and it grades readily into a theatrical performance in which tone of speech and the quality of the acting become the main thing. This form of discourse sprang up from the soil of a rural oral culture and still flourishes as a prop for supporting memory, a vessel for collecting and disseminating stories, and a technique for expressing identification with significant figures from the past.

Socialist Modernisation in Mongolia as Narrated after Socialism

Inner Asia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuki Konagaya
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
View Point ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
History Narratives

AbstractIn this article I introduce our collection of oral histories composed of life histories recorded between 2001 and 2006. First, I discuss some devices implemented in the process of collecting life histories, which was to make oral histories 'polyphonic'. I then suggest that oral history always has a 'dual' tense, in that people talk about 'the past' from the view point of 'the present'. This is illustrated by six cases of statesmen narrating their views about socialist modernisation. Finally, using one of the cases, I demonstrate the co-existence of non-official or private opinions along with official opinions about the socialist period in life-history narratives in the post-socialist period. I call this 'ex-post value'.

scholarly journals The fiction of History: recalling the past and imagining the future with Caesar at Troy.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Richard Alston
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Site

This essay considers the nature of historical discourse through a consideration of the historical narrative of Lucan’s Pharsalia. The focus is on the manner in which Lucan depicts history as capable of being fictionalised, especially through the operation of political power. The discourses of history make a historical account, but those discourses are not, in Lucan's view, true, but are fictionalised. The key study comes from Caesar at Troy, when Lucan explores the idea of a site (and history) which cannot be understood, but which nevertheless can be employed in a representation of the past. yet, Lucan also alludes to a ‘true history’, which is unrepresentable in his account of Pharsalus, and beyond the scope of the human mind. Lucan’s true history can be read against Benjamin and Tacitus. Lucan offers a framework of history that has the potential to be post-Roman (in that it envisages a world in which there is no Rome), and one in which escapes the frames of cultural memory, both in its fictionalisation and in the dependence of Roman imperial memory on cultural trauma.

Sound in the archive: Media materials as archives of narrative

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 78-83
Author(s):  
Seth Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
And Performance ◽  
State Library ◽  
Affective Impact

This paper describes and evaluates research undertaken by the author at the State Library of Queensland, in the collection, cataloguing, and presentation of audiovisual materials—specifically, sound materials beyond oral history and performance. It suggests that strategies drawn from transcription can make the sounds of the past more evident in digitised catalogues, and thus can make those sounds themselves more accessible to the public. In doing so it offers a different affordance of the archive to public experience: not just information about the past, but the affective impact of the past.

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