Collective Memory Meets Organizational Identity: Remembering to Forget in a Firm’s Rhetorical History

Much organizational identity research has grappled with the question of identity emergence or change. Yet the question of identity endurance is equally puzzling. Relying primarily on the analysis of 309 internal bulletins produced at a French aeronautics firm over almost fifty years, we theorize a link between collective memory and organizational identity endurance. More specifically, we show how forgetting in a firm’s ongoing rhetorical history—here, the bulletins’ repeated omission of contradictory elements in the firm’s past (i.e., structural omission) or attempts to neutralize them with valued identity cues (i.e., preemptive neutralization)—sustains its identity. Thus knowing “who we are” might depend in part on repeatedly remembering to forget “who we were not.” In press: Academy of Management Journal (Non-edited version) *Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Michael Pratt and the three anonymous AMJ reviewers for their guidance on this article as well as to Elena Corsi, Marina Dal Soglio, Vincent Dessain, and Kathleen Ryan for their assistance in data collection. We also thank Julie Battilana, Frank Dobbin, Karen Golden-Biddle, Mary Ann Glynn, Jay Lorsch, Joshua Margolis, Chris Marquis, Tsedal Neeley, Nitin Nohria, Lakshmi Ramarajan, Mike Tushman, Amy Wrzesniewski, and Tieying Yu for their comments. The article has benefited from participants’ feedback at the ASA Annual Meeting (Boston), the CNRS-sponsored “Labor and Organization” Colloquium (Aix-enProvence), the May Meaning Meeting, McGill University, and Tsinghua University. Both authors contributed equally.

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