The Firm that Would Not Die: Alumni Events, Sociability and the Residual Organization

Abstract

This paper argues that alumni events are not only settings where professional identities are renewed in social gatherings, or simply instruments to build and sustain commercially valuable networks. They can also be continuous with the organizations they celebrate by reproducing latent structural features of these organizations long after they cease to exist. Based primarily on participant observation of three annual lunches for alumni of the former accountancy firm Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and interviews with participants, organizers and non-participants, the paper makes two inter-related contributions to the study of professional service firms and to organization theory. First, it argues that alumni events reveal the variable durability and re-enactment of hybrid professional-social relations - what we call “sufficient sociability” - which were formed during intense working in small groups. Second, we show that these social relations, via table seating choices at an alumni event, produce what we call the “residual organization”. In this way, a modest alumni lunch in a central London hotel is transformed from an event of marginal interest, into a “site” where core issues of organization theory are at stake.