Organizational cultures of remembrance : exploring the relationships between memory, identity, and image in an automobile company / Daniel Mai.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Mai, Daniel, 1984- author.

Series:

Media and cultural memory ; Volume 21.

Media and Cultural Memory, 1613-8961 ; Volume 21 = Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Organizational behavior.

Collective memory.

Audi AG--History.

Audi AG.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (396 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin, Germany ; Boston, Massachusetts : De Gruyter, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In a business world predominantly oriented toward the future, it has paradoxically become ever more common that companies turn towards their pasts. This book empirically explores the phenomenon of organizational remembrance from a holistic cultural perspective. Based on a twelve-month ethnographic case study conducted at the headquarters of the German automobile company, AUDI AG, this study dissects the relationships between memory, identity, and image in a corporate setting. The greater aim in doing so is twofold: First, this study examines exactly why and how a company officially manages its past in terms of 'history' and 'tradition.' And second, this study scrutinizes what effect organizational remembrance has on the workforce - how it impacts their collective identification with a corporate community and influences their understanding of their daily working life. By investigating the interplay between different stakeholder groups, as well as their practices, media, mental models, and other vehicles of remembrance, an integrated account is offered which makes sense of the complex cultural forces at work in the corporate handling of the past, the present, and the future.

Contents:

Front matter

Acknowledgements

Contents

1. Introduction

2. A Cultural Perspective on Organizational Remembrance in Corporations

3. Empirical Research Design

4. Audi Tradition in its Role as the Official Carrier of Organizational Remembrance

5. Purposes and Cultural Forms of Organizational Remembrance

6. Multiple Stakeholders of the Corporate Past

7. Organizational Remembrance as a Historical Process of Evolution and Differentiation

8. The Emergence of Historical Consciousness among the Workforce

9. Construing Organizational Reality through Retrospection

10. Constructing Identities in Light of the Corporate Past

11. Conclusion

12. Appendix

Primary Material Cited

Academic Works Cited

Subject index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Dissertation Universität Giessen 2014.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9783110420685

3110420686

9783110420821

3110420821

OCLC:

912323300