‘Changing the Course of a Super Tanker’: A Study of Senior and Junior Managers’ Enactments of a Transition Narrative

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how a mnemonic community of a senior and junior generation of frontline managers, respectively with first-hand and second-hand memories of the organizational past, enact a shared historical transition narrative as part of their everyday practice of change management in a Scandinavian telecommunications company. The study shows the importance of actors’ individual trajectories and generational memberships for the understanding of collective memory in organizations. Based on the construct narrative habitus, the paper offers, as its primary theoretical contribution, a practice-theoretical framework for the study of mnemonic socialization and cross-generational dynamics of organizational mnemonic communities. MAD statement This article aims to Make A Difference (MAD) by providing an analysis of junior and senior managers' use of a historical transition narrative during temporally prolonged organizational change. The article offers new perspectives on the use of historical narratives and collective memory to manage change by showing that junior and senior generations of managers are habitually dispositioned to enact shared narratives in different ways. While extant research has shown collective memory to be an effective change management tool, our analysis draws attention to cross–generational dynamics as a particularly influential yet overlooked factor in shaping managerial enactments of shared historical narratives.