Abstract
This article focuses on organizational remembering in banking. To provide an alternative to the repository image of memory in organization, organizational remembering is conceptualized as narrative, where narrative represents a way to organize the selection and interpretation of the past. The narrative perspective deals with both the experiential and contextual nature of remembering by addressing concerns raised by critiques of organizational memory studies, namely, the subjective experience of remembering and the social and historical context in which remembering takes place. Antenarrative and microhistory methods are employed to discuss narrative fragments of remembering that deviate from consolidated narratives and indicate normal exceptions and an ‘ante’ state of affairs. Based on the study of narrative fragments of remembering in two different banking contexts, the article illustrates how the narrative perspective reveals ruptures and ambiguities that characterize organizational remembering that would remain hidden in the organizational memory studies approach.
Introduction
The focus of this article is organizational remembering in banking through a conceptualization of remembering as narrative. The last 30 years have witnessed a widespread global transformation of the banking sector. If the world of banking has for a long time been (or at least has been seen to be) a national, highly regulated and conservative business, beginning in the 1980s a new phase was launched that was characterized by globalization, deregulation and innovation (Cassis, 2010: 242). The financial crisis of 2008 has posed questions about this new phase, but we are unable to anticipate what the course of the events will be in this process. Retail banking has not been indifferent to these profound changes where the very purpose of its institutions has been challenged, resulting in disruptive working life experiences for the individuals involved in these organizations.
Management and organizational scholars have recognized the primary role played by the largely undocumented experience acquired over the years by individual workers and businesses alike and the crucial function it performs for the survival of organizations. Leveraging past experience, expertise and other collective resources can be a determinant of organizational success during times of change that can be ascribed to globalization of the markets, the advent of new technologies, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory issues, the evolution of work practices and so on.
There is a vast literature on organizational memory following Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) conceptualization of organizational memory as a storage bin. This article moves within the critique of a mechanical understanding of memory and of the preoccupation with the functional utility of memory for organizational performance and deliberation. It takes as a starting point the shift from organizational memory to organizational remembering suggested by Feldman and Feldman (2006) and builds on critiques of organizational memory studies (Booth and Rowlinson, 2006; Casey, 1997; Casey and Olivera, 2011; Feldman and Feldman, 2006; Nissley and Casey, 2002; Rowlinson et al., 2010) by conceptualizing organizational remembering as narrative. Such an articulation challenges accounts of organizational memory as a database repository and focuses on storying as a way to investigate how the past is remembered in organizations. In the section titled ‘From organizational memory to organizational remembering’, I revive the suggestion made by Feldman and Feldman as a move beyond the objectivistic repository image, and in the section titled ‘Organizational remembering as narrative’, I argue for a conceptualization of organizational remembering as narrative, where narrative represents a way to organize the selection and interpretation of the past. The narrative perspective deals with both the contextual and experiential nature of remembering and accommodates concerns raised by critiques of organizational memory studies, namely, the subjective experience of remembering and the social and historical context in which remembering takes place. In the methodology section, ‘Antenarrative and microhistory methods’ are discussed and problematized. These methods are chosen for their ability to place attention on the construction and reconstruction of the past by revealing ruptures and ambiguities that characterize organizational remembering. Such methods challenge linear narrative and traditional historiography approaches by focusing on anomalies and exceptions rather than consolidated narratives. The two cases examined in the section ‘Storying the past: narrative fragments of remembering in two banks’ deal with remembering in a community bank in the Southwest of the United States that has undergone subsequent acquisitions in the 1990s and 2000s, and in a Scandinavian bank that has embarked on greenfield operation in the United Kingdom starting in the 1990s. In the first case, data were collected from 2006 to 2009, while in the second case, data were collected from 2010 to 2011.
From organizational memory to organizational remembering
Walsh and Ungson (1991) drew attention to the concept of organizational memory with a seminal work in which they refer to organizational memory as ‘stored information from an organizational history that can be brought to bear on present decisions’ (p. 61), providing an understanding of its acquisition, retention and retrieval through storage bins (individual, culture, transformations, structures, ecology) and external archives.
The repository image and the articulation provided have evoked responses (Casey, 1997; Casey and Olivera, 2011; Nissley and Casey, 2002) in which the contested assumptions on the acquisition, retention and retrieval in the information system process have been paired with sociohistorical accounts on the notion of memory. These authors have responded to the repository image of memory as conceptualized in organizational memory studies by investigating both its social construction and transmission, but their critique remains within the ‘the paradigmatic lens of organizational memory’ (Rowlinson et al., 2010: 75). If ‘memory of past events is seen as a viable link in predicting and understanding current and future actions of organization’ (Casey, 1997: 111), the nature of this link has not been made explicit and the rejection of the idea that ‘past events, promises, goals, assumptions and behaviours’ (March and Olsen, 1976: 63) can be stored in an organization and used as strategic assets for performance and deliberation (Walsh and Ungson, 1991) remains incomplete. This gap is filled by Feldman and Feldman (2006), in which a ‘social and participatory conception of knowledge goes hand in hand with a conception of the organization as a distributed, decentred and emergent system’ (p. 862).
As argued by Feldman and Feldman (2006), the first step in the direction of a ‘conceptualization of organizational remembering as a collective, culture and time-specific process and practice’ implies a shift in terminology from ‘organizational memory’ (an object) to ‘organizational remembering’ (a practice) (p. 862). This shift represents a sound rejection of the idea of organizational memory as static storage, and this will form the basis of my distinctive contribution.
The concern with remembering rather than memory entails two questions that remain unsolved in Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) conceptualization, one dealing with ‘the distinctly human subjective experience of remembering’ and the other with the ‘specific social and historical context of organizational memory’ (Rowlinson et al., 2010: 69). Such questions have not found a conceptual frame to accommodate them, and in this article, I would like to provide a narrative frame to address them via the study of remembering in two banking contexts. The article will add to Feldman and Feldman’s (2006) work by investigating organizational remembering not only from an epistemological point of view but also from a methodological point of view through the study of remembering in two different organizational contexts.
The conceptualizing of remembering in this article challenges the mechanical and functionalist view of memory as portrayed in organizational memory studies. Remembering is a human activity; it is social and relational as we remember for others and through others, but it is also historically situated since we remember the past from the present. One of the aspects that such conceptualization brings to life is the simple idea that the past is remembered differently over time. If the storage bin metaphor deals with memory as an object ‘out there’ where remembered events are crystallized in
Organizational remembering as narrative
Organizational remembering is conceptualized as narrative, where narrative represents a way to organize the selection and interpretation of the past. The conceptualization of organizational remembering as narrative represents a further step in the rejection of the static repository image of memory. The shift from organizational memory to organizational remembering raises concerns over the forms in which it emerges and crystallizes in organizational settings. In this section, I argue for the treatment of organizational remembering as narrative by focusing on the storying lens as a way to gain access to the construction and reconstruction of the past in organizations. Narrative, as Bruner (2002) affirms, ‘is a precondition for our collective life in culture. I doubt such collective life would be possible were it not for our human capacity to organize and communicate experience in a narrative form’ (p. 16).
In management and organizational studies, various scholars (Boje, 1991, 2008; Czarniawska, 1997, 2004; Gabriel, 1991, 2000) have provided multiple interpretations of narrative drawing upon different epistemological foundations and considering the different purposes of their studies. I use a definition of narrative (or story) as ‘someone tells someone else that something has happened’ (Herrnstein Smith, 1981: 228). Herrnstein Smith relaxes assumptions on beginning, middle and end as the minimum condition for narrative and emphasizes narrative as social transaction. Following this definition, the content of the narration is always informed by the ‘other’, whether physically present or in the form of the social milieu described by Bakhtin and Volosinov (1973): ‘[t]he immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine and determine from within, so to speak, the structure of the utterance’ (p. 86). This calls attention to not only the immediate social situation of the telling but also the broader social and historical context in which the narrators are immersed, and which they help shape in return.
Narrative deals with contingent and local meaning of events where stories let us ‘gain access to deeper organizational realities, closely linked to their members’ experiences’ (Gabriel, 2000: 2). Experience is also evoked by Boje (1991) where he defines story or storying as ‘an oral or written performance involving two or more people interpreting past or anticipated experience’ (p. 111), placing emphasis on the involvement of the narrator in the construction of meaning.
Narrative deals with the organization of remembered past through the selection of what is meaningful for the narrator, through associations that have little to do with chronological time but live in the relationships between events and events, and events and actions that make interpretation possible.
This conceptualization helps us in reconciling both the contextual and experiential nature of remembering and addresses concerns raised by critics of organizational memory studies. When the French sociologist Namer (1987) affirms that memory is essentially a narrative act, we can say that organizational remembering can be seen as narrative, where the storying organizes the selection and interpretation of past events in a relational and experiential remembering process that does not belong to the past but lives in the present from which it is activated and in which it crystallizes.
Corporate narratives, working life stories, anecdotes and instructions become the tapestry that arises from interaction at different organizational levels, becoming a frame within which organizational members negotiate their organizational everyday life. To tell as a story, storying ‘lives in the middle ground of the here-and-now’ where ‘the exchanges between structure and the event, between system and act, do not cease to be complicated and renewed’ (Ricoeur, 1974: 95). In this sense, each storying, each telling, is new and the investigation of its ever-changing material confronts us with both the mediated contextual forms in which it crystallizes and the emergent and precarious nature of these forms.
Reconstruction of individual past
There are two aspects that a conceptualization of organizational memory as narrative addresses: one has to do with the reconstruction of individual past, and the other with the narrative time of remembering.
Remembering is an activity performed by individuals within organizations, and the reconstruction of the individual past represents a crucial aspect in the study of organizational remembering. The site of organizational memory has represented an unsolved dilemma in organizational memory studies, mirroring an aporia that remains alive in the organizational memory literature—that is to say, the treatment of organizational memory as both an individual- and organizational-level construct. This aporia has been paired with mechanistic models of understanding and ways of reducing complexity that ‘vacillate between putting emphasis on either the individual or organizational component of memory’ (Feldman and Feldman, 2006: 864).
Organizational scholars have incorporated notions from social memory studies and translated concepts such as collective memory into the organizational realm. Nissley and Casey (2002), for example, incorporate the notion of episodic memory and collective memory to articulate their findings. Revising the work of Stein and Zwass (1995) and drawing on social memory studies in the work of Halbwachs (1980), Nissley and Casey (2002) argue for the relevance of the notion of episodic memory as ‘shared interpretation of personally experienced events’ (pp. 37–38) and compare it to ‘semantic memory’ defined as ‘shared interpretations of significant events that were not personally experienced’ (p. 37). They argue that ‘similar to episodic memory, collective memory takes context into account and is defined as a social process of constructing memories that are collectively shared’ (p. 38). The treatment of organizational memory as a ‘link’ to predict and understand performance and deliberation in organizations (Casey, 1997: 111) does not make explicit the treatment of the collectively shared and the personally experienced, given that their critique of the repository bin can be framed in the direction of a dynamic view of organizational remembering. Organizational remembering resides in an interpretative rather than functionalist paradigm and the same can be said in this article for the narrative conceptualization. Narrative provides a way to gain access to the organization of the past, its selection and interpretation, where the storying lens helps us in shedding light on the meaning of the past for organizational members.
Narrative reconciles concerns raised by organizational memory studies critics as it features both contextual and experiential aspects. Organizational narratives represent not only all of the stories that belong to a certain organization or community but also a certain way of telling them. Similarly, for Halbwachs (1980), the collective memory of a group is not only all of the representations of the past that are collected and transmitted within a group but also a common way of interpreting them. Narrative deals with both the content of the narration and the way in which the content is recounted in different moments. Narrative represents a way to organize the selection and interpretation of the past and it is through this selection and interpretation that remembering takes place. Without the possibility of placing events within certain determined forms even the individual reconstruction of the past would not be possible. As expressed by the German literary critic and philosopher Benjamin (1936) when talking about men coming back from the war, they were not ‘richer but poorer of communicable experience’. It is not that they had no experience—on the contrary—but that their experience could not be activated in the social, communicative practices of the present. There was no language in which the exchange of remembering could be made possible. Without the possibility of placing remembered events within a network of social practices of remembering that allow for picturing the event in a common shared meaning, even individual memory cannot be formed.
Narrative time of remembering
The second aspect addressed by a conceptualization of organizational remembering as narrative deals with the construction and reconstruction of the past in different times. Conceptualizing the reconstruction of past events cannot neglect dealing with time and chronological sequence. Organizational remembering conceptualization deals with time not in terms of chronological sequence but in terms of the duration of the past in the present and the effect of the present on the remembering of the past. In this sense, I see this conceptualization as dynamic where narrative represents a way to investigate the link between past events, the present and future actions that has been sought by critiques of organizational memory studies. If organizational memory studies treat memory for its function in the specific time in which the decision takes place, organizational remembering conceptualization addresses the construction of meaning for the organizational members involved. Narrative time plays a crucial role in this conceptualization, and Ricoeur (1983) provides us with an extremely powerful suggestion for tackling the representation of the past in organizations and its implication for organizational remembering, which is the focus of this article. Ricoeur (1983) makes a distinction between cosmological time (time of the world,
Antenarrative and microhistory methods
The methods chosen for the study of remembering in two different banking contexts are antenarrative and microhistory. The antenarrative method has been proposed by Boje (1991) in the context of narrative inquiry for organizational and communication research, while microhistory (Ginzburg, 1980; Levi, 1991) has flourished in Italy within historiography for social and cultural history.
In order to investigate the construction and reconstruction of the past, I have focused on narrative fragments elicited in interviews with organizational members. These remembering accounts shed light on the human aspect of remembering where the spotlight is on the individuals and the way in which the selection and interpretation of the past is performed. This selection and interpretation is at the same time contextual and experiential, as I will show in the next section. I will talk about narrative fragments since the excerpts presented and analysed do not often constitute what scholars would refer to as proper narrative as they do not possess the beginning, middle and end structure and emplotment as a minimum condition for narrativity (Czarniawska, 1997; Gabriel, 2004). The selection of these story fragments differs from narrative inquiry work in the sense that the search is not for consolidated narratives but for narrative fragments that show the opening to a doubt, the space for other possibilities or questions that remain unanswered. Such narrative fragments link the past to the present in ways that are unexpected and make us question the representation towards which we are inclined.
Narrative fragments are close to the definition of antenarrative provided by Boje (2001), where ‘ante’ holds a double meaning:
As being before and as a bet … story is an ‘ante’ state of affairs existing previously to narrative; it is in advance of narrative … secondly ante is a bet, something to do with gambling and speculation … antenarrative is never final; it is improper. (pp. 1–2)
Elsewhere, Boje (2001) has claimed that antenarrative ‘gives attention to the speculative, the ambiguity of sensemaking and guessing as to what is happening in the flow of experience’ (p. 3). In his work on memory, Boje (2008) refers to collective memories of various groups in organizations (p. 81) and uses the antenarrative method to tackle them. The treatment of collective memory shows polyphony at a collective level, but leaves unsolved the question of experience that is the centre of the antenarrative definition. Antenarrative becomes a way of studying counter-narratives in relation to dominant corporate narratives, where the focus is not on experience and an ante state of affairs but rather in an alternative reconstruction that employs the same resources and has the same conditions of narrative. The use of antenarrative in this article stresses the emergent and unfinished nature of narrative fragments, and in this sense is close to the ante sensitivity proposed by Boje. The narrative fragments in the next section feature polyphony at the individual level and give attention to the moments in which a personal question of sense arises in the account. The chosen method differs from the search of consolidated narrative but also dissociates from the search of counter-narratives as a way to portray the polyphony of various groups. In this sense, story fragments are close to Arendt’s (1985) suggestion when she claims ‘who says what it is … always tells a story, and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning’ (p. 262). It is this humanly comprehensible meaning, or the space of experience, that represents the core of the relationship between organizational remembering and narrative as storying, and represents a way to organize the selection and interpretation of the past. This is made possible within the narrative fragments through associations that are more similar to the madeleine of Proust’s (1913–1927: 48–51)
The attention placed on individual experience is one of the components of the microhistory approach, which deals with a smaller scale and takes as a unit of research ‘a village community, a group of families, even an individual person’ (Ginzburg and Poni, 1991: 3). The changing of the scale is not confined to the fact that the object of the observation is smaller, but represents a methodological aspect as ‘the scale of observation is changed in the hope of revealing previously unobserved factors’ (Magnússon and Szijártó, 2013: 20). Microhistorians look for the ‘exceptional normal’ (Grendi, 1996), that is to say the exceptional document that can be much more revealing than a great number of conforming documents. These normal exceptions explore the tension between the social mechanisms of determinacy and the emergence of experience. Ginzburg (1980) discusses the life of Menocchio, an Italian miller of the 16th century, and notices that ‘in Menocchio’s talk we see emerging, as if out of a crevice in the earth, a deep-rooted cultural stratum so unusual as to appear almost incomprehensible’ (p. 58). The crevice represents the opening to which I have been alluding when talking about the opening to a doubt, the space for other possibilities or questions that remain unanswered. In the next section, microhistory and antenarrative will be at play in the study of remembering in two banks.
The context of the fieldwork is two research projects carried out from 2006 to 2009 in the United States and in 2010–2011 in the United Kingdom. One deals with a community bank in New Mexico, to which I will give the fictitious name ‘Old West Bank’, which has undergone two acquisitions, one at the end of the 1990s and one in the 2000s, becoming part of a big financial group. The other deals with the greenfield operation of a Scandinavian bank, to which I will give the fictitious name ‘Nordic Bank’, which has expanded its operations in the United Kingdom. These two apparently distant banking realities provide examples of organizational remembering and ways to study it in moments of change: subsequent acquisitions and a greenfield operation. The research projects were informed by the specific time in which they were performed, as these years represented an important moment for a banking industry deeply affected by the financial crisis: while the first project was almost entirely carried out before the crisis, the second project was undertaken afterwards. In both research projects, I conducted interviews with members of the organizations through long, semi-structured narrative interviews performed during repeated visits.
The context of the interviews is that of two research projects on management and organizational histories of banks. The interviewees were asked to talk about their professional life, the history of the organizations in which they have been involved and the evolution of management practices in their organizations. The reconstruction provided in this article has been possible through different sources: first, the material accounts already produced by the organization in the form of reports, brochures, internal newsletters, official speeches and archive material; second, through externally produced information available about the bank, such as books and newspaper articles; and third, the accounts elicited during interviews with members of the organization. The aim of this complex reconstruction was to investigate the basis of collective reconstruction of the past, as well as the individual mechanisms of negotiations and redefinitions of the experience that this material not only reflects but also helps to shape. In the next section, the material shown and discussed will be that of the excerpts from transcripts, where the explanation of such transcripts would not have been possible without the aforementioned reconstruction.
Storying the past: narrative fragments of remembering in two banks
In this section, I will present narrative fragments of remembering in two banks. The purpose of the study has not been to rewrite the histories of these banks, nor to attempt to write a history of the financial crisis by showing a before and after case, but rather to reflect on storying as a lens, a tool to investigate organizational remembering.
Histories of banks can primarily be found in books written by historians, and also in the form of brochures available for customers. When I started my project with Old West Bank, I came across a book written by a historian of the bank, and when I arrived in the United Kingdom I found a brochure with a timeline and an explanation of the different phases of the expansion of Nordic Bank in the United Kingdom. Such examples are interesting for comparison with narrative fragments elicited during interviews with organizational members as they adopt a chronological order and an external point of view.
The narrative fragments of remembering presented in this section contrast the linearity of such ex post reconstructions and present trajectories of recomposition of organizational remembering from the point of view of the actors involved.
These fragments deal with both the subjective experience of remembering and the social and historical context in which remembering takes place. They show how social and relational instances emerge and are shaped in the bankers’ experiential accounts. Before presenting these excerpts, I will provide an example of how common sense is achieved through narratives in the words of one of the executives of Old West Bank. The banker, who started working for the community bank in the 1960s, talks about one of the traditions that have evolved in the community bank. Community banks were offering commercial banking and were not allowed to have branches outside the state. The US banking industry had enjoyed years of relative stability after the separation between investment and commercial banking imposed by the Glass–Steagall Act and the geographical fragmentation specified by the McFadden Act, in which community banks such as Old West Bank could have branches only within state limits. This world crumbled with deregulation and the repeal of both the McFadden and Glass–Steagall Acts in the 1990s:
I will tell you, one of the traditions that had evolved over time was that before the bank opened and after we would review the rejected checks, after we finished that, we would go to the coffee shop and there was a lot of just general conversation—we talked about things happening in the community, things that were happening in sports and happening in politics but you always ended up to some extent to things that were affecting the bank—and that is not to say that we did not have more structured formalized management meetings, but a lot of the conversations in the coffee shop had to do with banking and a lot of ideas evolved there …
In this excerpt, telling a story implies the building of a community; the stories told at the coffee shop are stories that circulate in the community of bankers at Old West Bank and respond to the consolidated narrative conditions. What is interesting about these stories is that they are important not only for their content but also because they represent a certain way of telling that is performed by organizational members. By going to the coffee shop, the executives of Old West Bank not only get to know the stories of the community to which they belong but also build a common way of interpreting events. In this sense, this excerpt provides an example of the role of narrative in the construction of a common way of interpreting events. The next account, provided by another executive of Old West Bank, sheds light on personal involvement and interpretation of such socialized practices:
See, my background has been with the Federal Land Bank and it was highly structured and the applications were very detailed and comprehensive and we had policies for everything so… to be honest I was never totally comfortable with the informal management decision-making process, but there was more than one time that I felt like we may be wasting time during those sessions at the coffee shop and I had more important things to do so I quit coming. Well, when I quit coming I found that I was going out of the loop so quickly … so I started to go back to the coffee shop [laughs].
In this excerpt, there is an opening, in terms of ambiguity, which remains at the level of an ante represented by the snatches ‘I may be losing my time’ and ‘I was not comfortable’, revealing the tension between the socialized practices and the space of experience. I have presented this excerpt as it is representative of the sensitivity informed by antenarrative and microhistory methods. The narrative fragments show how certain rules and certain codes could be broken at the level of the individual, and this brings me close to the normal exceptions microhistorians talk about.
The same tension is visible in excerpts from interviews with bankers of Nordic Bank, a bank that underwent a major change in the 1970s, shifting from a centralized to a decentralized model, and has been confronted with internationalization in the 1990s. In Nordic Bank, socialized accounts of the past contrast with fragments of remembering that open up to alternative trajectories. In the next excerpt, one of the executives of the bank tells about the major change that happened in the past, when the bank became a decentralized institution giving power to branches. He talks about the CEO who put this change into action:
He stopped all that and said we don’t need it and he moved over many more responsibilities to local branches … and it ought to be much better as the head offices don’t have a very big knowledge on what is happening on the local market … and that’s the way we are told …
This excerpt represents a consolidated narrative of the change from a centralized to decentralized model, signalled also by the ‘that’s the way we are told’. As said before, remembering does not only involve the content of remembered events but also a way of interpreting them. The next except offers a questioning of such a socialized account in the words of an executive of the bank:
Well, it is easy to say but much harder to do … and I don’t mean that he didn’t do the right thing …
The reconstruction of the individual past passes through the experience of a difficulty, where the space of the experience is the space between the words ‘easy to say’ and the actions ‘harder to do’, leaving us with a clue to the reconstruction of the individual past that lives in the space in between the socialized consolidated accounts and the fragments of experience.
By highlighting narrative fragments that diverge from consolidated narratives, we come across ruptures and ambiguities that characterize organizational remembering.
Ruptures
Narrative fragments of remembering tie together past, present and future, connecting different points in time. Organizational remembering is activated in the present and contains trajectories of future expectations. In the next excerpts, I will deal with ruptures—breaks in the chronological sequence that represent pivotal points for the reconstruction of the past. Past can be storied through connections—associations that emerge in the storying itself and do not correspond to linear sequencing. Such connections deal with the human nature of remembering and would be overlooked by models of memory such as the repository model. In the account presented below, one of the community bankers in the narrative performance reads a quote from a leather booklet titled Well, I thought, before we started you may be interested in looking at a paragraph or two here. It’s a case of history repeating itself, just start right here …
By associating two different natural disasters, the banker interprets the present in the narrative time of remembering. The narrative time of remembering allows for an association between two different times that are apparently distant, but yet they are reconciled in the narrative fragment ‘except that it didn’t destroy banks’; the clue for interpretation stands in this narrative fragment that enables the comparison between the two apparently distant events. If the Bank of Hatch had survived the recession, it did not survive a natural disaster; the present time is the time of a natural disaster and the clue, the question that does not destroy the buildings but leaves the comparison suspended. And it is this suspension—this gap in the narrative fragments—that represents the core of the interpretation.
Narrative fragments of remembering reveal associations that could not emerge in an objectified storage bin; these associations can be triggered by the reading of a book, as in the previous excerpt, or by the view of an object such as a pin, as in the next excerpt. The next account is provided by another community banker while remembering the rough acquisition at the end of the 1990s, when the lifting of the ban on interstate banking allowed competition and forced the bank to be acquired by a bank that I will call Wild West Bank:
See the pin, for example our pin used to have that circle on it and they put a diamond every five years and Ben and I had too many diamonds … I still have my pin … well, you just have to go on, to move on, it’s different, like being divorced, starting over again, like a new life when we first did the [Wild West Bank] deal they told us that everything was going to be wonderful …
The view of the pin brings the banker back to the time of the old community bank, but this link reveals a rupture not expressed but signalled by the ‘you just have to move on’, where the past does not find space in the present and expectations from the past are not met in the present—‘it’s like being divorced’. Narrative fragments of remembering deal with the space of experience and the horizon of expectation—‘they told us that everything was going to be wonderful’ but that was not the case. Such unattended promise and unanswered questions remain at the level of experience. When talking about the acquisition, the bankers remember the past of the community bank but the narrative remains broken, interrupted, revealing the rupture that characterizes such organizational remembering.
In the account provided below, one of the bankers of Nordic Bank tells the story of the change in the 1970s and the context in which this change occurred:
It was a big experience—experiment, excuse me—and … I think it was very, very important that they let him make those changes and I bet they were rather nervous because it was … no one has ever done anything like that …
In this narrative fragment, in which the banker mistakes experience for experiment, we get close to the experience of an ante state of affairs, of the story before it became a story, and in this ante state of affairs there is nervousness as no one knew what was going to happen. When talking about the greenfield operation, the bankers talk about the bank’s past and the changes that occurred in the 1970s, and this narrative reveals ruptures as witnessed in the next excerpt. In the next account, the banker talks about the context of the early stage of the greenfield operation, in which the decentralized bank operated in a different way in the United Kingdom:
It will be a big difference, we had been in Britain for [a] rather long time but during that time there were no regional banks, there was no business alike these businesses coming up from the local market, at that time in London … we had a time when we had an office in London doing more of big corporate business in London … in my opinion I don’t think we established this whole new organization in [Nordic Bank] but … they were doing business in a completely diverse way.
In this excerpt, the narrative allows for a reconstruction of the past that diverges from the linear narrative of the decentralized bank internationalizing its operations in the United Kingdom, and serves as an example of the power attributed to the branches locally. An ante to the decentralized narrative—a rupture—emerges in the narrative. The decentralized bank was not operating in a decentralized way in the early stage of its internationalization; or rather it was not doing so abroad, which represents a rupture in the organizational remembering.
Recompositions
Storying allows for recomposition of narrative fragments along emergent trajectories and gives the bankers the possibility of composing meaning across different times, as witnessed by the account of one of the community bankers when telling the story of the night when they signed the acquisition:
I will never forget the day. We were all at the Double Eagle restaurant and they gave me this clock, see, February 2nd 1998 … It was a marvellous time in my life and I thought I was rich … but I wasn’t, but that’s all right.
In the storying, the teller assigns different meaning along different narrative fragments—‘I thought I was rich … but I wasn’t’—and crystallizes his experience in the ‘that’s all right’, which allows for a recomposition at the individual level. But recomposition is not always possible, and the impossibility of storying the past is one of the ways in which experience can be suppressed, as we can see in the next account given by the same community banker when describing the visit of the acquiring team:
I was in charge of taking care of them, so I took them around and showed them all the branches and we went down to Anthony, kind of crappy-looking, and they asked how long is the lease and I said no lease we own it, and they said how much do we own … They had no clue!
In this case, it seems that there is no language in which experience can find expression, and the incommunicability between the banker and the acquiring team does not allow for any recomposition but remains at the level of an unattended promise, of a gap that cannot be filled. The narrative is unexpectedly interrupted and this interruption represents a loss, a lost opportunity of connecting the present and the past in a representation.
This excerpt can be compared with an opposite example, which portrays the narrative of a British manager at Nordic Bank who had been an employee of a British bank for a long time, which I will call Union Jack Bank:
As I said, this is most similar to what we used to do, at least when I was in [Union Jack Bank] we had a similar structure and branches and local managers, and … now it is like being back in that.
The interpretation of the present is made through a remembering of the past—a past of the Union Jack Bank in which the model was similar to that of the decentralized Nordic Bank. The narratives of disruptive moments in the evolution of Union Jack Bank into a centralized model that eventually led to the loss of the banker’s job are filled in and reinterpreted in a continuum that crystallizes in the narrative.
Discussion and conclusion
In my study of narrative fragments of remembering performed by the bankers, narratives move along consolidated narratives and emergent fragments and oscillate between individual reconstruction and socialized accounts. The narrative fragment represents a way to deal with the possibilities of organizing the selection and interpretation of the past where storying connects meaning and events across different times. In the investigation of the reconstruction of the past through the storying lens, organizational remembering portrays ruptures and recompositions that would not have been revealed using the organizational memory studies approach. Narrative makes the past accessible in the present in a way that differs from the repository image; as activated through narrative, the past is not only remembered differently over time but it also acquires a humanly comprehensible meaning.
In the case of Old West Bank, the remembering of the acquisition brings to life the past of the old community bank that cannot find space in the present and represents a loss in terms of remembering, a rupture that entails a difficult recomposition. The case of Nordic Bank features an opposite situation, where the remembering of the greenfield operation brings to life the past of the bank’s change from a centralized to decentralized model, providing an answer to the composite experience of the UK bankers who have lived the change from decentralized to centralized models and can fit their past into the present of the decentralized Nordic Bank, which represents an ante to the evolution of the British banking industry.
The focus is on a view from ‘within’ where narrative fragments capture the organization and selection of what is meaningful for the narrator through associations that live in the emergent and experiential here and now of organizational members involved in the processes.
The critique to the storage bin metaphor has taken as a starting point the shift from organizational memory to organizational remembering suggested by Feldman and Feldman and has paired the notion of organizational remembering with the narrative perspective as a way to accommodate concerns raised by the critics of organizational memory studies, such as the treatment of the subjective experience of remembering and the social and historical context in which the remembering takes place. This treatment entails an understanding of remembering as a human activity regarded as social, relational and historically situated.
The preoccupation with the storage and utility of memory material has been replaced with a concern for the storying of the past that emphasizes the selection and interpretation of past events in the light of the experience of the individuals involved. The focus is not on replacing one metaphor (storage bin vs storying) with another, nor on showing that organizational memory is a narrative act, but rather on the implications and possibilities provided by the use of narrative for interpretive research. The storying perspective combined with antenarrative and microhistory methods focuses on the emergent and contingent meaning for the actors involved where the storying organizes the selection and interpretation of past events in a relational and experiential remembering process that does not belong to the past but lives in the present from which it is activated and in which it crystallizes.