Uses of the Past
The past is not merely inherited—it is made, mobilized, and contested. This section focuses on how entrepreneurial and organizational actors use history strategically: to construct identity, justify action, and shape legitimacy. Drawing from rhetorical history and memory studies, these works illuminate how history functions as a dynamic resource for navigating present and future challenges.
Introduction
The concepts of “rhetorical history” and “uses of the past” have become central themes at the intersection of organizational theory and business history. Rather than treating history as a static record of events, this perspective focuses on how the past is actively constructed, mobilized, and contested within organizations. It draws from a growing body of scholarship that explores how historical narratives shape and are shaped by organizational identity, strategy, legitimacy, and power.
This research agenda treats history as constitutive rather than representational. History is performed. Organizations use the past to justify present decisions, to project futures, and to construct a sense of continuity or rupture. In this sense, history becomes a strategic and performative resource, enabling actors to make and unmake organizational orders.
Scholars in this tradition have explored the socially embedded nature of historical sensemaking, highlighting how history is shaped by material artifacts, narrative forms, intertextual references, competing interpretations, and the audiences that receive them. This approach emphasizes that history is always situated, not only temporally, but also politically, culturally, and materially.
This lens provides valuable insights into how entrepreneurial and organizational actors engage in historical reasoning, navigate legacy and tradition, and mobilize memory to shape change. It also opens space for critical reflection on whose past is remembered, how it is told, and to what ends.
Key References
Introduces the concept of “rhetorical history” as a strategic resource. The authors argue that firms can gain competitive advantage by skillfully constructing and deploying historical narratives that align with their strategic positioning.
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Offers a comprehensive framework for studying how organizations use the past as a resource for action. Emphasizes history’s role in organizing processes, such as identity formation, legitimation, and strategic change.
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Proposes a typology for how historical narratives are strategically employed by organizations. Differentiates between conserving, reforming, and transforming uses of the past, with a focus on narrative construction.
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Examines how family businesses use generational narratives as rhetorical history to frame identity, succession, and change. Highlights the strategic role of the concept “generation” in family business storytelling.
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Examines how firms selectively remember and forget aspects of their past to manage organizational identity. Highlights the constructed and political nature of organizational memory.
A critical historiography of corporate culture at Cadbury. Demonstrates how histories are constructed and repurposed to serve evolving organizational needs, questioning assumptions about historical objectivity.
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A philosophical exploration of historical temporality. Koselleck’s concepts of horizon of expectation and space of experience underpin many organizational theories on how the past is interpreted and used to shape the future.
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Explores how founder figures are used as symbolic and rhetorical resources to negotiate contemporary identity tensions. A compelling case of how personal history becomes collective strategy.
Investigates the tensions that arise when historical narratives, once seen as assets, become liabilities. Highlights the dynamic and sometimes contested nature of historical resources.
Argues for a more phenomenological and situated understanding of history in organizations. Emphasizes how actors experience and interpret the past in lived, material, and embodied ways.
Sinha, P. N., Jaskiewicz, P., Gibb, J., & Combs, J. G. Forthcoming. Managing History: How New Zealand's Gallagher Group Used Rhetorical Narratives to Reprioritize and Modify Imprinted Strategic Guideposts. Strategic Management Journal.
Shows how a firm used strategic storytelling to reinterpret its historical legacy. Offers insight into how narratives can revise path dependencies and reshape organizational direction.
Identifies micro-processes of using history authentically in organizations, departing from a historical artifact as a source of inspiration for novel actions
Investigate how material memory is used in four corporate museums. Identifies three different modes of engagement of history and organizational identity capable to inform future organizational actions.
Shows that painful memories can be transformed into mnemonic resources, offering insight into the potential of organizations to repackage history-at-large by curating experiences of the past through a combination of semiotic modalities and remembering practices.
Shows how middle managers take an active role in using the past when top managers have divergent understandings of the past and different visions of the future. Strategic use of the past is a continuously changing process enacted by multiple middle managers with different temporal orientations.
Investigate how managerial action is shaped by the subjective experience of history, and how change and innovation in long-standing organizations are constrained by bounded imagination, that is, projections toward the future are always anchored in history and tradition.
Explores of how complex relationships to the past (positive, negative, and conflicted) influence mobilizing multiple forms of historical representation in organizational practices, both discursive and non-discursive.
Shows how organisational actors strategically leverage on a vaguely defined past constructing historical narratives capable to invent and perform a cultural heritage in the present.
Underlines that managers are not the solely controllers of the rhetorical histories by showing the corporate archive as a site of contestation by multiple stakeholders (owners, archivists, historians, audiences).
Shows how organizations can invent traditions by leveraging nostalgia, reconstructing memories tied to shared consumption practices, and relying on brand-related materiality that supports the persistence and reproduction of rhetorical histories by making them tangible.
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