Memories of trauma and organizing: Market women’s susu groups in postconflict Liberia

Abstract

This study builds on social-constructionist approaches to organizational memory studies by exploring how traumatic memories reconstruct present-day organizing practices. Using African feminist ethnography, I explored how war memories shaped market women’s informal credit organizations called ‘susu groups’ in postconflict Liberia. Findings show that traumatic memories engender and sustain three organizing practices: idealization, amplification, and contraction. Idealization is the projection of an ideal type of organization after traumatic events have occurred. This practice enables members to suppress a painful past and start anew by collectively reinventing their organization. Amplification is the intensification of certain elements, which become the most important in the organizing process. Amplification can make negative experiences resonate more deeply than positive ones. Contraction is the propensity of organizations to close off from the outside world after trauma. In the case of susu groups, contraction accentuated an existing tendency toward secrecy. The study contributes to intersections of organizational memory studies and trauma and organizing scholarship by showing how memories linger and continue to shape organizations long after trauma.

Introduction

Over the last two decades, organizational memory studies or OMS has explored connections between memory and organizing and yielded a substantive body of work. Recently, there has been a shift from functionalist (Walsh and Ungson, 1991) to more social-constructionist approaches to OMS (Casey and Olivera, 2011; Feldman and Feldman, 2006; Rowlinson et al., 2010; Schatzki, 2006). This shift illustrates growing concerns for contextually grounded work (Clegg, 2009), which approaches memory as a dynamic construct that organizational members negotiate collectively. This study, which explores connections between memories and present-day organizing practices, directly builds on social-constructionist approaches to understanding organizational memory.

If I find many useful propositions formulated within this body of work, I also broaden the scope of our understanding by focusing specifically on traumatic memories. Although there is significant research on the impact of trauma on organizing (Frost and Robinson, 1999; Long, 2002, 2008; Lutgen-Sandvik, 2008), this literature exists separately from OMS, with few studies explicitly bridging these two bodies of work. Consequently, connections between traumatic memories and organizing practices are undertheorized. I fuse OMS with research on trauma and organizing in this study by considering traumatic memories as particularly potent on organizations. This integrative framework helps understand war memories in ‘susu groups’, market women’s alternative forms of organizing in postconflict Liberia. The study is timely given the pervasive nature of trauma in contemporary organizational life (Stein, 2001). Consequently, scholars exploring traumatic memories in other contexts—including Euro-American organizations—will find this work relevant.

Market women were essential in supplying food to Liberians during a 14-year civil war (1989–2003). Today, they continue to play a vital role connected to food security, through their grassroots organizations: susu groups. These groups, known as rotating credit associations in anthropology (Ardener, 1964; Geertz, 1962), guarantee access to capital to purchase food items. Susu groups pool money on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis by collecting set amounts from each susu member, putting all the money together, and distributing the lump sum to one person at a time. In postconflict times, market women rely on their susu money to purchase goods necessary to maintain their food business.

Market women and susu groups are interesting to study from an OMS perspective because they absorbed violence frontally; they were directly exposed to war, given the highly mobile and interactional nature of market work. I argue that war memories left substantive imprints on susu groups and investigate how these memories reshape postconflict organizing practices.

War, daily practices, and memory in West Africa

Cultural and critical scholarship on war has explored the topic by looking at daily practices and memory (Berliner, 2010; Ellis, 1999; Ferme, 2001; Højbjerg, 2010; Nordstrom, 2004). This body of work focuses on how war is ‘expressed and redressed in daily activities’ (Knörr and Trajano Filho, 2010: 12). Of interest is the idea that war unravels people’s lives and that they have to reconstruct them afterwards (Das and Kleinman, 2001; Shaw et al., 2010). The anticipated return to normalcy is in many cases illusory as conflict changes ways of living (Shaw, 2007). As Nordstrom (2004) puts it,

[…] the habits of war die hard. They can carry beyond the frontlines and into the fragile pulse of peace. If peace starts in the midst of war, aspects of the war continue past peace accords to affect the daily life of a society until they are dismantled, habit by habit. (p. 141)

In this sense, postconflict daily practices carry within them traces of war. Research has examined a variety of practices, spanning from the economic (Bürge, 2011) to the culinary (Shepler, 2011) and the religious (Shaw, 2007). Shepler (2011) examines food practices in postconflict Sierra Leone and shows how war histories were mapped onto food consumption and preparation. During wartime, people started consuming food items that they had never eaten before of necessity. This practice solidified in the postconflict era and became part of the everyday. In addition, many displaced people brought back new ways of preparing food after sojourning in neighboring countries. That is how bread was introduced to certain communities where it was not consumed previously. Shaw (2007), who studied Pentecostal religious practice in postconflict Sierra Leone, shows how wartime memories of violence were incorporated into a religious cult, reshaping daily practices therein.

Shaw’s study highlights how daily practices and memory become intertwined. Memory plays a mediating role between war events and contemporary practices by accentuating certain ways of living or interrupting them through ‘forgetting’ (Shaw, 2007). Memory also plays an interpretative role by functioning as a lens through which individuals make sense of current practices (Smith, 2005). Missing from this literature on war, daily practices, and memory is a focus on organizing practices. I address this gap by exploring war memories and susu group organizing in postconflict times through OMS. The latter is a useful framework to explore traumatic experiences in organizations.

OMS

OMS, a subset of management studies, has emerged as a dominant approach to understand the role of memory in organizing practices. If much of this work favored functionalist and instrumentalist approaches (Fiedler and Welpe, 2010; Walsh and Ungson, 1991), it has recently incorporated social-constructionist perspectives (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) drawing on sociology, anthropology, and history (Feldman and Feldman, 2006; Rowlinson et al., 2010; Schatzki, 2006).

I draw on a few propositions formulated in this work (Feldman and Feldman, 2006). A first proposition emphasizes the importance of the broader context that is inextricable from organizational memory. As such, the Liberian postconflict context is not mere external contingency but is woven into the fabric of susu groups. A second proposition is that organizational memory is a collective construction and not the aggregation of individual memories (Rowlinson et al., 2010). I align myself with this notion by tracking points of convergence in stories that susu members recalled. A third proposition is the framing of all organizational members as agents—including the ones with little power—rather than passive recipients of organizational memory. It is relevant for my bottom-up approach, which favors the marginalized group of market women. Despite the formulation of propositions, few empirical studies of a cultural–critical nature have been undertaken with the exception of Nissley and Casey’s (2002) exploration of corporate museums.

Departing from a managerial bias toward Euro-American corporations (Rowlinson et al., 2010) in this literature, I examine the topic of memory and organizing in a different organization and place: African women’s grassroots organizations in a postconflict context. Understanding memories in posttraumatic contexts—including Western organizations that have experienced disabling conflict—calls for a more circuitous approach. Tracking changes in organizational practices via the medium of memories is an indirect and elusive process rather than a straightforward one. Individuals sometimes fail to explicitly acknowledge and name changes when invoking memories. Rather their recurrent narratives about the past often implicitly contain elements to track changes.

I propose an oblique methodological route to studying organizational memory. I focus on the types of stories that susu members privilege when talking about the past, even if these stories do not speak to organizing practices on the surface. In doing so, I bring the importance of oral memories to light. Where empirical research on memory has tended to adopt a Western logic focusing on physical sites, reports, and documents, such an approach ignores the importance of orality in other contexts. In West Africa and Liberia specifically, the orality of storytelling, narratives, songs, and proverbs is a traditional and cultural way of remembering (Oyewùmí, 1997). The significance of orality is compounded by the legacies of war or the destruction of material evidence and written records. I connect OMS to work on organizations that have experienced severe trauma (Frost and Robinson, 1999; Long, 2002, 2008; Lutgen-Sandvik, 2008). I fuse both bodies of work by showing how traumatic memories disable organizations, recreating new practices in the process.

Trauma and organizations

I turn to work drawing on psychoanalytical approaches (Diamond, 1993, 1997; Driver, 2003; Gabriel, 1991, 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Stein, 2007) because it focuses on indirect expressions of trauma through the unconscious. The unconscious is a core notion, acknowledged as the realm of the repressed, which organizational members draw upon to enact fantasies (Gabriel and Carr, 2002). While most of this work is circumscribed to severe trauma occurring in Western organizations, it is built around the assumption that traumatic experiences ripple across organizations. Therefore, I find this literature helpful to understand trauma and organizing in other contexts, including postconflict societies.

Scholars generally frame trauma as disabling; it is a potential source of widespread dysfunction for organizations. On the topic, Gabriel (2012) invokes the concept of ‘miasma’, a noxious state spreading across all levels of the organization. A core assumption is that organizations absorb trauma and take on new shapes. To this effect, Fischer (2012) speaks of the ‘isomorphic’ effects of trauma on organizations. This line of work has often explored how leaders’ personality disorders deform organizations, which become ‘toxic’ (Goldman, 2006, 2008; Kets de Vries, 1984; Lipman-Blumen, 2005a, 2005b; Stein, 2001).

Although this literature gives significance to the unconscious, it does not sufficiently conceptualize how memory fits within this realm. This constitutes a gap given the tendency for people to repress traumatic memories and relegate them to the unconscious. Analyses specifically focused on how organizational members unconsciously draw on traumatic memories to reshape present-day practices are lacking. One exception is a study on trauma in a mental health-care organization, drawing implicit connections between traumatic memories and the recreation of organizations (Fischer, 2012). I argue for an explicit link by suggesting that traumatic memories are as potent as the actual catalyst or traumatic event triggering change. Long after tragedy, organizational members draw on collective memory of trauma to reshape their organizations. In this sense, memories in general and traumatic memories in particular have subsequent material consequences on organizing: they engender new practices and also sustain them over time. My case study builds on this assumption by considering how this process unfolds. I explore how wartime memories shape susu groups’ organizing practices in postconflict Liberia.

The Liberian context

An exploration of wartime memories calls for a contextual understanding of Liberia in times of war and peace. Liberia is a West African nation with a total population of 3,989,703, and 882,000 people live in the capital city of Monrovia (CIA, 2013). Origins of the war are directly connected to the inception of the nation. Freed American slaves established Liberia as the first African republic in 1847 (Sesay et al., 2009). Settlers formed an elite class by cutting themselves from the majoritarian indigenous population (Jaye, 2003). As a ruling class, they discriminated against indigenes and adopted Americo-Liberian national symbols that reinforced their control over the nation (Jaye, 2003).

Throughout the 20th century, the gap between indigenes and Americo-Liberians widened as a tight system of patronage further concentrated political and economic opportunities in the hands of the elite. The economic crisis of the 1970s compounded structural inequalities between Americo-Liberians and indigenes. These issues led to a military coup by Samuel Doe, an indigenous Liberian seeking retribution (Sesay et al., 2009). Ethnic violence in the form of mass killings, torture, and silencing of the opposition and press ensued.

These problems led to a coup by Charles Taylor in 1989. Political turmoil in the form of two civil wars wracked Liberia: the first one lasted from 1989 to 1996, and the second from 1999 to 2003. During the first Liberian war, Taylor fought other factions for the control of Monrovia. Liberia held democratic elections in 1997, marked by the victory of Charles Taylor, whose presidency did not end the violence. The second Liberian war started with the emergence of new factions in 2003, which eventually agreed to peace the same year. Charles Taylor went into exile in Nigeria, and a transitional government was formed (Disney and Reticker, 2008). Liberia held democratic elections in 2005, marked by the victory of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Since then, Johnson Sirleaf has been reelected for a second term (2011–2017) and has won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Liberia’s economic situation and relationships with other nations have also improved.

Susu groups

Susu groups are rotating credit associations (Ardener, 1964; Geertz, 1962). These grassroots associations include members who contribute a given monetary sum to the group. The money is then pooled together and the lump sum is redistributed to one member at a time (Geertz, 1962). Once all group members have received their money, the cycle starts anew. Rotating credit associations are often the only way for marginalized individuals, who cannot access official banking, to procure significant sums of money. Rotating credit associations constitute a common organizational structure in West Africa. In Liberia, Seibel and Massing (1974) document the existence of susu groups in both rural and urban areas. The groups pool money on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For market women, susu groups are vital because they allow them to access much needed capital to sustain their small business. Upon receiving susu money, the women purchase goods to garnish their stalls.

Market women’s susu groups typically have a leader called the susu mother or susu ma and 15 to 20 members on average. Seniority is an important factor used to determine one’s eligibility as a susu ma. This means that older women who have been known in the community for a long time and have established a reputation of trustworthiness are often preferred. The susu ma is responsible for running a susu group; she makes sure that all members pay in a timely manner and that the money is redistributed to the member who is set to receive it at a given moment. Susu groups perform complex financial operations by enabling members to double, triple, quadruple, or quintuple their dues, allowing them to receive a proportional return on investment.

African feminist ethnography

I draw on African feminist ethnography as a method for studying susu groups. I claim the term ‘African’ to align myself with the oppositional work of African feminist theorists, developing culturally grounded frameworks to understand contemporary concerns of the continent (Amadiume, 1987; Kolawole, 2004; Mikell, 1997; Nnaemeka, 1998; Ogundipẹ-Leslie, 1994; Oyewùmí, 1997). Rather than essentializing African subjects, my method resists stereotyping (Nkomo, 2011) and recognizes heterogeneity on the continent. African feminist ethnography focuses on the flexible and resilient nature of African organizational forms in contexts of war and peace. This approach accounts for the recovering of ‘traces’, a term I use to indicate how ethnography follows fragmentary pieces of knowledge in postconflict contexts. This can be explained by the destruction of material evidence and the silence in which trauma survivors retreat.

I conducted fieldwork in Fiamah, a food market in central Monrovia. The market depends on the Liberian Marketing Association (LMA), an umbrella organization in charge of most Liberian markets. Fiamah vendors pay weekly fees to the LMA and abide by the organization’s rules. The market is administered by a superintendent and an assistant superintendent who oversee 250 to 300 vendors. Most vendors are women, with the exception of eight men. I interviewed 40 individuals and engaged in 100 hours of participant observation from May to August 2011. I then used a grounded theory approach to analyze the texts (Charmaz, 2004; Glaser and Strauss, 1999).

Interviews lasted from 40 to 45 minutes and were conducted in the LMA office, a site close to market women’s stalls. After securing approval from the superintendent and the assistant superintendent, I used the office at predetermined intervals, when they were away on fieldtrips. Three market women whom I befriended facilitated the recruitment of participants for me. Interviews were all audiotaped and later transcribed. Regarding participant observation, I adopted an active role by fully immersing myself in market life. This entailed selling market goods, which some of the women taught me how to do. While monitored at first, I was eventually left to sell alone at the stalls. I typically conducted a few hours of observation and took headnotes, which were transcribed to fieldnotes on my computer. I also collected organizational documents, including The Administrative & Operational Guidelines of the Liberian Marketing Association (LMA, 1999) and the Handbook/Guideline for Operation of Markets (LMA, 2010).

Delving into wartime memories posed methodological challenges. I asked susu members to remember events that had happened 15–20 years ago for the first war (1989–1996) and 8–13 years ago for the second war (1999–2003). Elapsed time complicated the task of recovering memories, which were already fragmentary and incomplete in nature. Despite this challenge, memories proved to be the best path to understanding the past due to the lack of local sources on the Liberian war. Despite the existence of nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports on the country, I found that the only individuals who had firsthand accounts of the war were Liberians who had stayed in the country.

However, market women silenced war memories and kept an appearance of normalcy, like victims of trauma elsewhere. This tendency was accentuated by West African cultural norms, which emphasize the need to keep uncomfortable truths to oneself. One would have never known what the women had experienced unless one asked. Given this context, interviewing market women yielded the most information. I inquired about susu group existence and functioning during war and peacetimes. I supplemented their memories with ethnographic observation. I used a technique I call ‘walking my way backwards’ to trace susu groups from the postconflict present to wartime. This technique involved two steps. I first observed susu group practices in the market on a daily basis. I then asked market women whether similar practices had existed during war. Presentism or the tendency to read past events in light of the present may have been involved when using the ‘walking backwards’ technique. However, this concern was justified by the absence of other texts like written sources on the Liberian war. Next, I reflect on my positionality as a researcher.

Positionality

I am an Ivorian–French woman, who was born and raised in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and completed my graduate education in the United States. During fieldwork, citizenship, education, language, and gender shaped my encounter with market women. Although some of the women progressively acknowledged my African background, I could not entirely shed my ‘Americaness’ in my interactions with them. During interviews, some of the women were timid and I recognized that they deferred to my educational background. The digital recorder used as well as the consent forms marked me as an educated person. In terms of language, I had difficulties understanding the women who spoke Liberian English. I waited until I became fluent in Liberian English to conduct interviews. Of all elements, gender brought me closer to my participants. This was the case as Fiamah market women were reluctant to let men get involved in what they perceived as women’s activities and business.

War memories and organizing

Idealization

Traumatic memories engender and sustain the practice of idealization or the projection of an ideal type of organization after traumatic events. I use ‘ideal’ not in the sense of perfection but in reference to what is most desirable for organizational members. This practice enables members to suppress a painful past and start anew by collectively reinventing their organization. Key to idealization is the use of traumatic memories as a polarizing building block: the reinvented organization significantly differs from how it used to be during the traumatic era.

Memories contribute to the idealization of time: individuals project their organization in an ideal time period—antithesis of the traumatic era—to recreate a more desirable story of origins. The ideal period is a generic canvas on which individuals transpose hopes for the future of their organization. They attempt to create an organization that exemplifies the very societal values of this ideal time period, a process similar to ‘prefigurative politics’ (Breines, 1980, 1982; Gamson, 1991; Polletta, 1999, 2005). Social movement scholars apply this concept to the act of engendering and sustaining ‘within the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that “prefigure” and embody the desired society’ (Breines, 1982: 6).

Of importance is how individuals overlook possible issues that the ideal time period presents. Susu mas and members inscribed susu group genesis in postconflict times, seen as ideal to organize. They were similar to many other Liberians, for whom postconflict times had come to crystallize their expectations. It did not matter that wartime issues still carried over to the postconflict era. Interviewees remembered that susu groups disintegrated during war and were recreated during the postconflict era. Jane, a susu member, recalled,

After the war, right away, we started the susu. After the war, sometimes you know, little time passed, like one or two months. When we were free and we felt that things were fine, we started our susu again. Yeah, we started our susu.

Central to idealization is the obliteration of discordant temporal information, a type of forgetting that OMS scholars discuss (Casey and Olivera, 2011). Organizational members sustain an ideal story of creation by suppressing their history during the traumatic era. Some women shared that susu group activity had continued during some periods of the war, running counter to the common story of disintegration during war and recreation during postconflict times. Wahde explained, ‘When the war is hard, then we leave it [the susu], when it cools down we start’. Michelle also shared,

In the war, my mother had a susu, she was the susu head, so she used to keep people’s money. They brought the money to me; I wrote down their names. When my mother came, I gave her the names.

Despite some of these experiences, it made more sense for susu mas and members to reinvent time by projecting their organization in the more desirable postconflict period. Susu mas and members silenced susu existence during wartimes because this period did not provide the ideal conditions to establish the groups.

Traumatic memories construct these conditions indirectly: organizational members do not acknowledge them overtly but implicitly carve them out of accounts of disintegration. As such and contrary to some assumptions of OMS, the workings of memory are often circuitous rather than straightforward. At the individual level, one condition—emerging out of narratives of survival—is the satisfaction of basic needs like food and security. Dekontee stated,

You don’t even know whether you would survive the war. So why would you make susu? You were only asking God, ‘God, let me just be’. But you didn’t know your own time. A bullet could pick on you anytime and you died. So we were not after susu business. We were just after food.

This quotation expresses the importance of survival and food needs, which superseded saving money during war. In such a context, individuals could not be trusted with money because they would use it to buy food items.

At the collective level, market women talked about two conditions required for susu group existence: stability and trust. These conditions were implicitly defined through their wartime nemesis of displacement and distrust. Margaret recalled,

There was no susu because anybody could run away anytime. So the first reason was: anybody could just run away. You live here today, when the fighting gets heavier tomorrow, you leave and go to a different area, so nobody were making susu. Everybody got their money right in their lappa.

This description captures the unpredictability that accompanied the civil war as individuals moved to a different location overnight to flee fights. This context impeded susu group activity, which depended on close geographic proximity of members to facilitate regular monetary deposits. Mapu shared,

Everybody was scattered. How will you do susu with somebody? Sometimes the person runs with your money. You will not know where that person went. But now everybody is sitting in one place. I know where you are and you know where I am. But during wartime, we don’t have a set place to live. Sometimes your own house is not safe and you will move.

Highlighted in this quotation is ‘sitting together’, which refers to the stability and routine of selling in the marketplace. Lurpu, a susu member, stated, ‘Yeah, people can’t do it [the susu], everybody stopped because war was fighting you know. Everytime the person that has the susu can steal your money’. Like Lurpu, other market women framed war as a period of distrust, during which individuals would steal susu money. It was impossible to get one’s money during wartime even if it were someone’s turn in the susu cycle. Individuals took advantage of the collapse of the court and police systems to steal with impunity.

Amplification

Traumatic memories also engender and sustain the practice of amplification or the intensification of certain elements, which become the most important in the organizing process. A crucial point to consider is that amplification has the potential to make negative experiences resonate more deeply than positive ones and have a stronger impact on organizing practices, which can inherit dysfunctionality.

Traumatic memories redefine certain elements, which are then used as the basis for amplification. In the case of susu groups, war memories infused new meanings into trust.

Emergent definitions of trust bring to the fore certain elements, one of them being ‘running away’. The simple evocation of the term seemed to generate angst from susu members. A constant fear of group members, running away had become synonymous with stealing susu money in wartime and was used to assess someone’s trustworthiness in postconflict times. Dekontee shared that her susu ma ‘had stayed long with us, for a very long time. We know her. She did not run away’. In this example, the susu ma was deemed trustworthy because she had not ‘run away’ during war. Closely tied to ‘running away’ is length of time spent in the market, which is a second element used to gauge trustworthiness. Market women often talked about the number of years that a given susu group had been in operation to attest to its reputation. Length of time directly affirmed a susu ma’s trustworthiness, implying that she had not run away with susu money during war.

Traumatic memories shape trust in a narrower way by favoring definitional elements stemming from the war period. Susu mas and members amplify these particular understandings of trust. Jane shared the following:

One time, one woman, I didn’t know the woman, she used to put people’s susu. A fat woman! She went, she put the susu, she collected plenty of money from people. She ran away, she went to America. […] Yeah, she ran away with the people’s susu money. People cried here, some people got heart pressure from it. Yeah oh. She ran away with people’s susu. So many people went to her house. They were told, ‘Oh, but the woman went to America!’ Yeah, oh, so when we don’t know you; it is hard for us to put susu with you.

Jane’s narrative is an all-too-common wartime story of a susu ma stealing money and fleeing to the United States. Of interest is the direct connection established between this episode of distrust and the need to ‘know’ people before forming a susu group with them. The term ‘know’ is used by market women to connote the deep understanding of a person’s character, allowing for the establishment of trust. At another point in the interview, Jane reiterated the importance of ‘knowing’ other susu members, in light of bad wartime experiences:

You just heard these kind of news during that time [war]. People came and started stealing people’s money. Everything ceased and the money business went down like that. Yeah, so now, we can put susu with people that we really know. Like the woman who is having the monthly susu.

The woman referred to in this excerpt is the susu ma, who is trusted because susu members ‘really know’ her. In this sense, experiences of distrust amplified trust, now used as a prime criterion to establish and grant access to susu groups in postconflict times. Only the trustworthiest individuals had the privilege of establishing a susu group and becoming a susu ma, as evidenced by this exchange:

Edwina:

[…] The susu is like the bank, yeah, because you first have to trust the person before they can lay the susu.

Interviewer:

So not everybody can lay susu?

Edwina:

No, not everybody. When you give money to some people, they eat it. So it is like when you trust the person, everybody trusts the person; then the person lays susu.

In such a perspective, most sought-after susu mas were ‘fair’ or reputable in the market. Trust was also used as a selection criterion, as only trustworthy individuals could access a group. Anna recruited her members on this basis. ‘I tell friends [about my susu] that I know. People that I trust, that are able to pay my susu’. Similarly, Jane explained how her susu ma mostly used trust to deny or grant admission to the group:

When you are a bad person in the community, you can’t hide. For that reason, when you come, and you are bad and she [the susu ma] knows, she can’t put you in the susu. She will say it is full, you know she will say the susu is full […] Whether it not full, oh, she will just say it is full and she will start looking for people that can really put her susu.

‘Bad’ individuals were notorious in the market for having the habit of not paying debts and were casted as untrustworthy. Once one had established such a reputation, it was almost impossible to join a susu group.

Contraction

Traumatic memories engender and sustain the practice of contraction, or the propensity of susu groups to close off themselves from the outside world. This inward focus accentuates an already existing tendency toward secrecy. Liberia is characterized by the existence of multiple secret organizations like the Poro and Sande religious societies that initiate individuals into adulthood (Ellis, 1999). The principle of secrecy seems to have extended beyond secret organizations to shape other organizations like susu groups. Organizational contraction expresses itself through gender, nationality, and relationships with official postconflict institutions.

Traumatic memories solidify gender and nationality through narratives of Nigerian susu men. Prior to the war, there were susu groups independent from market women’s groups. Men commonly ran these groups known as ‘Nigerian susus’ or ‘card susus’. While circumstances through which the label ‘Nigerian’ came to be applied to these susus are unclear, one explanation exists. It seems that both the men and the way they ran their susus were perceived as Nigerian or at least non-Liberian. The appellation ‘Nigerian’ calls for brief commentary. During the last few years, it has connoted dubious business enterprises and increased the perception of Nigerian nationals as dishonest in West Africa and elsewhere on the continent.

Nigerian susu men were independent entrepreneurs providing susu services to business people in Monrovia. Although Nigerian susu men were not part of the market, they largely recruited among market women. Nigerian susus functioned as a mobile bank and were different than market women’s groups because they were voluntary. They required no set amount as women could turn in any sum. In addition, there was no specific schedule to make deposits, leaving women the freedom to contribute to the group as wanted. Nigerian susu men came to the market every day, carrying a bag containing stacks of index cards, each attributed to one individual. The men recorded deposits and withdrawals on the cards and charged a minimal fee for their services. Nigerian susus provided flexibility to market women but proved risky as the men took advantage of war to run away with susu money. A majority of market women reported bad experiences with Nigerian susu groups. This exchange I had with Evelyn illustrated her negative experience:

Evelyn:

During the war, I was not a susu ma; but I was a susu member; then the person who had the susu ran away. They stole all our money, everything.

Interviewer:

Can you talk about this experience? How many members were in this susu during the war?

Evelyn:

It was the Nigerian susu, the card. Sometimes they bring the card. Every time you pay, they mark it, every time you pay, they mark it.

Evelyn added that this experience had happened to her on three separate occasions. Similarly, Adelaine remembered a man who ran a Nigerian susu and stole the susu money:

One man did it in the market. Before the war would come, they ran with people’s money. Some people have a good heart. After the war, they had money in the bank; they withdrew it and gave it back. But some of them, they were keeping the money for themselves. So during the war, they and their family, they took all the money. After the war, when you asked for the money, they said the war took it [the money].

Adelaine explained how the susu man used the war as an excuse for the loss of susu members’ money by saying that ‘the war carried it’. Susu members were not dupes and were aware that the man had indeed stolen the money.

Market women seemed to have given greater attention to gender and nationality after these negative experiences. Some explained that market women’s susu groups were created as a reaction to the abuses committed by Nigerian susu men. Caroline recalled,

The susu, we all started this susu during 1996, the April 6 war. After the war ceased. You have been in the market, you can see some men with a bag, with a susu card; we used to put susu with them. Yes, during the war, we used to put susu with them […]But when the time to get our money came, they said, ‘Oh, rogues came to my house; they stole all the money’. Then we became the victim. They said rogue busted their house, hijacked them, and stole the money. ‘They hijacked me, they took the whole money bag’. So we were the victims as the market women, so we decided that we should settle our own susu.

This reactionary moment accounts for the solidification of gender, which became a dominant feature of the groups. Caroline signaled this shift by mentioning that ‘our own susu’ was established with the sole purpose of catering to women selling food in the market. Nigerian susus, which were ‘plenty’ before and during the war, drastically reduced in number in postconflict times as women turned to their own groups to save money. Market women’s suspicion of men intensified after the war. This gendering also mirrored what I term a ‘nationalization’ of the groups. Nationalization can be defined as the claiming of Liberian identity in everyday organizing practices. This phenomenon is evidenced by the fact that Liberian men have taken over the Nigerian susu practice in postconflict times.

Despite numerous bad experiences with Nigerian susus during war, many market women continued to contribute to these groups in postconflict times. They justified their membership by the fact that Nigerian men no longer ran the groups but had been replaced by Liberian men. During my fieldwork, a middle-aged Liberian man ran the sole Nigerian susu group of the market. The man who was usually dressed in business casual clothing carried a black leather attaché case to the market around 4 o’clock every day and was highly popular with the women. In interviews, women further explained that Nigerian susu groups were now safe because ‘our own Liberian men’ were in charge of them.

This belief signaled a return toward Liberian identity for market women in general and susu group practice in particular. The claiming of national identity was particularly noticeable during the period of my fieldwork, marked by the sojourning of several Ivorian refugees in Monrovia. These refugees had fled neighboring Côte d’Ivoire to escape a civil war, and their presence in Liberia was regarded with ambivalence at the time. In this sense, susu group contraction was an immediate response to Nigerian susu men and a broader reaction to the influx of foreign refugees in Monrovia.

Finally, traumatic memories contribute to susu group contraction as related to official postconflict institutions and banks more specifically. Memories of a widespread banking collapse followed by the embezzlement of money still resonated deeply. For instance, Anna indicated,

During the war, people had money saved in the bank. When the war came, the bank couldn’t refund their money. The various banks ate the people’s money. When you went to them [the banks], they said, ‘It is war!’ So that fear, I still have it. Even though there is peace, I still have that fear within me. That is why I put my money in the club and I do the daily susu.

The fact that money vanished from banks during the war contributed to fear of these institutions in postconflict times. Of interest here is the mention of the ‘club’, which is an indigenous bank. Susu money is typically directed to the parallel financial circuit of clubs that are at-home banks in the community. In several cases, individuals in charge of a given club deposit money from all members into official banks. However, this is not typical. Many women considered susu groups and clubs safer than banks, despite the obvious threats associated with handling susu money in public and saving it at home. This perception isolated market women from official banks, limiting their access to financial benefits and their full integration into postconflict Liberian society.

Discussion

This study explores how traumatic memories linger long after trauma and reshape postconflict organizing practices. In this sense, memories leave more than a simple imprint on organizing. They carry material consequences by reconstructing the following practices: idealization, amplification, and contraction. I reflect on this reconstruction process by (1) highlighting its circuitous nature, (2) discussing the elements that are constitutive of it, and (3) proposing a framework that connects memorial practices. In the process, I highlight contributions to social-constructionist approaches to OMS and trauma and organizing scholarship.

A circuitous approach

The tendency to frame memory as straightforward and easily retrievable is still pervasive in social-constructionist approaches to OMS. This tendency, deriving from a managerial bias, feeds analyses that focus on the more visible and explicit features of memory. In this perspective, memory typically unfolds in the context of Euro-American corporations, where primacy is given to written records (Nissley and Casey, 2002). I make the case for the social construction of memory and practices at an unconscious level; the process occurs unbeknown to organizational members and through oral memories that do not speak to organizing on the surface. I argue for a more circuitous approach focused on the invisible and the unstated. This technique can contribute not only to social-constructionist OMS but to trauma and organizing scholarship.

This approach provides specific insight for explorations of the ‘unconscious’ in posttraumatic organizations. If the unconscious is the realm of repressed stories and fantasies, it is elusive and difficult to apprehend. The circuitous approach can help access the unconscious through its focus on memories. The latter are more indirect than direct questioning, providing a less invasive way to recover repressed traumatic events. Following this route can help track subtle changes expressed through dramatic and recurrent stories of distrust and displacement and that organizational members would fail to register explicitly. The metaphor of the ‘circuit’ frames the interplay between the unconscious and present-day practices as more dynamic than the trauma and organizing literature suggests. Instead of looming over trauma survivors in static fashion, the unconscious is drawn on actively to rebuild organizing practices.

Building blocks

In this sense, traumatic memories are building blocks—the basis from which members reconstruct their organizations after trauma—that have a polarizing effect on organizing. These memories provide ‘definitional elements’, or elements from the traumatic past that trickle down to the present and redefine both discursive and structural features of organizations. Traumatic memories serve as polarizing building blocks, meaning that they are so dramatic and violent that they precipitate organizations in the opposite polarity or what organizational members perceive to be so. The practices of idealization, amplification, and contraction illustrate this polarizing effect. They show how traumatic memories recreate organizational stories, partially change structural features, or cause organizations to close off from the outside world.

The idea that traumatic memories are more polarizing than regular memories nuances generic and formulaic understandings, which frame the workings of memory as similar in all situations. In this sense, social construction is highly contingent on context. Although practices of idealization, amplification, and contraction transfer to other contexts—including Western organizations—they build on contextually specific memories. In the case of postconflict organizations, memories are oriented toward wartime experiences of distrust and displacement, which in turn shape idealization, amplification, and contraction. The study also adds to trauma and organizing scholarship, which has tended to focus on actual traumatic events as a source of disruption. I claim that memories of trauma can have as strong of an impact on organizing as the actual catalyst. As such, both social-constructionist approaches to OMS and trauma and organizing scholarship need to consider the potential for creation and annihilation that traumatic memories hold. Because traumatic memories tend to be dramatized with time, their potency on organizing lingers long after violence has occurred. Next, I propose a framework to make sense of memorial practices.

A framework for memorial practices

I conceptualize idealization, amplification, and contraction as a set of memorial practices varying in intensity and coexisting on the same spectrum. The study highlights how the unconscious and memories in particular produce differentiality in organizing practices.

Idealization constitutes a first degree, during which organizational members modify the discursive features of their organization. They reinvent an ideal organizational story that often suppresses parts of the painful past. Amplification constitutes a second degree, during which members modify both discursive and material features of their organization. They redefine certain values and realign their organization to match these new definitions. Finally, material changes are more obvious when considering contraction, a third degree during which members close off their organizations. Discourse and materiality are not mutually exclusive in this conceptualization. They coexist in all three practices but are more salient in some than others.

In conclusion, traumatic memories are not inherently good or bad for organizations. Instead, they can be simultaneously beneficial or detrimental to organizations. This determination is contingent on the intensity with which these practices are deployed. For instance, it may be useful for organizations to contract temporarily after trauma. However, taken to an extreme, contraction can generate isolationism, which carries practical implications. It may undercut broader social change possibilities for market women. Such possibilities include access to advantages provided by official banks. A second problem is homogeneity of the groups that may foster exclusion and hamper creativity and innovation.

This analysis provides avenues for future research by bringing to bear memory and trauma in contexts other than Euro-American organizations. Postconflict contexts can help understand the unique practices that traumatic memories engender and the significance of other types of memories, including oral ones. If this study sheds light on more disabling practices, future work can examine how traumatic memories recreate resilient organizations. Scholars can also focus on how idealization, amplification, and contraction are expressed in other contexts and organizations. In particular, what types of contextual elements are constitutive of these practices in other contexts?