Abstract
Abstract The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory Project was launched by the former President Mandela in 2004 as a special project of the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF). In 2006, the Foundation’s Board of Trustees decided to adopt the Centre as the Foundation’s core operational function, a decision to be implemented in terms of a 5-year transition plan. In February 2012, the latter ended with a public announcement of the organisation’s new mandate to work in the memory–dialogue nexus and intention to unveil the Centre as a public facility in 2013. This fundamental organisational transition (with many subsidiary change management processes) was informed by four dedicated research interventions, all conducted within an overarching action research framing: an investigation of the ›memory for justice‹ tradition in South Africa and its possible institutional application by the NMF; a global benchmarking study of cognate institutions; a study of dialogue as an element of Mandela’s legacy in relation to the memory–dialogue nexus; and a marketing and branding survey. Verne Harris and Shadrack Katuu provide an account of these interventions, highlighting in each case the research designs and subsidiary research and analysis techniques. The article begins with a tracing of relevant historical and archival contexts and concludes with an assessment of the organisation’s change management process and the efficacy of the organisational research agenda.
Highlights
In 1999, Nelson Mandela stepped down after a 5-year term as South Africa’s first democratically elected President
A combination of access to relatively generous resourcing and an injection of human rights cultures enabled the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) to commit to a change management process informed by systematic research-based scrutiny of its work, its internal operations and the environments in which it seeks to make an impact
Can be positioned within an action research frame
Summary
In 1999, Nelson Mandela stepped down after a 5-year term as South Africa’s first democratically elected President. It was absorbed by the NMF institutional change management process as a demonstration of collaborative researchbased advocacy in the memory–dialogue nexus and an indication of how South Africa’s ›memory for justice‹ tradition might still be living-energy capable of meaningful expression in institutional spaces. At the end of the 5-year transition plan, the revised institutional vision was for dialogue to shape memory construction, memory to shape dialogue interventions, and dialogue to enrich and energise memory resourcing – organic relationships, in other words, energising social justice action and determining appropriate models and methodologies through a dialogical engagement with the specificities of time, place and voice This analysis was based on qualitative impressionistic internal research. This was to result in brand confusion for years afterwards
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