Narratives and Memory in Organizations

Knowingly or unknowingly, organizations use memory and history every day in branding and in constructing their culture and identity. Through this process, organizations make sense of the present, creating new knowledge but also oblivion through the narratives of their past. The process of remembering and forgetting is inevitably selective, whether conscious or unconscious, as organizations continually make and remake their history, lest others create it for them. Organizations are enabled and constrained by these critical narratives of their past, with potentially profound implications for the identity projects of those who engage or are engaged with those narratives, i.e., from the individual employee level through to the consumers of the grand narratives of capitalist value and worth.

In Narrative and Memory in Organizations, a special issue for Organization, the performativity of narratives—and repositories of narratives such as architecture, design, artifacts, and texts—will be explicitly addressed. Narratives have long claimed attention in the humanities, and over the last 10 to 20 years the social sciences have picked up on the topic, thus taking a critical position towards the ontological and epistemological positions of realist ideas of the role of narratives as presentations of social reality.

The editors of this special issue (Andrea Casey, Per H. Hansen, Albert J. Mills and Michael Rowlinson) invite contributions that apply theoretical insights from the humanities and social sciences with empirical evidence from public and private organizations. They aim to publish primarily theoretically informed empirical studies, and are open to diverse methodological approaches.

Papers must be submitted by June 1, 2012. Papers should be between 5000 and 8000 words and will be blind reviewed following the journal’s standard peer review process. Accepted papers will be published in January 2014.