Unravelling the relational processes involved in the co-construction of organisational memory

Research in organisational memory studies has illuminated the ways that organisations shape, and are shaped by, remembering and forgetting (Foroughi et al., 2020). However, recent work by Coraiola et al. (2023) has called for research that focuses on the multiple mnemonic communities with organisations. This paper responds to this call by analysing and deconstructing the processes through which memory is constructed. The research context is a large UK-based multinational bank that reconstructed the firm’s organizational memory during a period of crisis that damaged its legitimacy. To examine this phenomenon, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews that revealed the collaborative and relational process that the corporate archivists and the senior management team engaged in order to resolve the banks organizational crisis. In doing this, we theorised how different mnemonic communities collaborated to co-construct organisational memory in the form of a historical narratives. This study contributes to organisational memory studies theory by showing the importance of taking both an interpretive and functionalist perspective when researching memory; and contributes empirically by producing a process model that shows the memory construction in practice, and by highlighting the organisational power relations that can affect how this process unfolds.