Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Organization Studies, 40 (2), 2019, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2019 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Organization Studies page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/oss on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/
Accepted author manuscript, 4.95 MB, PDF document
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘Remembering as Forgetting’
T2 - Organizational commemoration as a politics of recognition
AU - Cutcher, Leanne
AU - Dale, Karen
AU - Tyler, Melissa
N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Organization Studies, 40 (2), 2019, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2019 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Organization Studies page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/oss on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/
PY - 2019/2/1
Y1 - 2019/2/1
N2 - This paper considers the politics of how organizations remember their past through commemorative settings and artefacts. Although these may be seen as ‘merely’ a backdrop to organizational activity, they form part of the lived experience of organizational spaces that its members enact on a daily basis as part of their routes and routines. The main concern of the paper is with how commemoration is bound up in the reflection and reproduction of hierarchies of organizational recognition. Illustrated with reference to two commemorative settings, the paper explores how organizations perpetuate a narrow set of symbolic ideals attributing value to particular forms of organizational membership while appearing to devalue others. In doing so, they communicate values that undermine attempts to achieve equality and inclusion. Developing a recognition-based critique of this process, the discussion emphasizes how commemorative settings and practices work to reproduce established patterns of exclusion and marginalization. To this end, traditional forms of commemorative portraiture that tend to close off difference are contrasted with a memorial garden, in order to explore the potential for an alternative, recognition-based ethics of organizational commemoration that is more open to the Other.
AB - This paper considers the politics of how organizations remember their past through commemorative settings and artefacts. Although these may be seen as ‘merely’ a backdrop to organizational activity, they form part of the lived experience of organizational spaces that its members enact on a daily basis as part of their routes and routines. The main concern of the paper is with how commemoration is bound up in the reflection and reproduction of hierarchies of organizational recognition. Illustrated with reference to two commemorative settings, the paper explores how organizations perpetuate a narrow set of symbolic ideals attributing value to particular forms of organizational membership while appearing to devalue others. In doing so, they communicate values that undermine attempts to achieve equality and inclusion. Developing a recognition-based critique of this process, the discussion emphasizes how commemorative settings and practices work to reproduce established patterns of exclusion and marginalization. To this end, traditional forms of commemorative portraiture that tend to close off difference are contrasted with a memorial garden, in order to explore the potential for an alternative, recognition-based ethics of organizational commemoration that is more open to the Other.
U2 - 10.1177/0170840617727776
DO - 10.1177/0170840617727776
M3 - Journal article
VL - 40
SP - 267
EP - 290
JO - Organization Studies
JF - Organization Studies
SN - 0170-8406
IS - 2
ER -