Back to Business: A Next Step in the Field of Oral History

The Usefulness of Oral History for Leadership and Organizational Research

Abstract: Business organizations and elites are often neglected in oral history as a result of the dominant assumption that elites have ample opportunity to be heard. We argue, however, that researching corporations and elites is very interesting for oral historians. This contention is supported by the four contributions that legitimize the use of oral history as formulated by Richard Crownshaw and Selma Leydesdorff. First, oral history research on organizations and elites is important for archival reasons as it helps to record information that would otherwise be lost. Second, we argue that the use of oral history for research on leadership and organizations is scientifically sound. Third, the democratic contributions of oral history provide misrepresented employees and leaders of organizations with a voice. This improves current narratives on corporate and elite history. Leaders in particular are vulnerable to not being treated democratically. They have the greatest chance of being written out of the history of an organization and as such “losing” a part of their life story. This so-called damnatio memoriae can be experienced as a traumatic event. The fourth contribution of oral history, its therapeutic usefulness, can be very beneficial in such a case.

Keywords: business history, damnatio memoriae, elite research, leadership, learning histories

Introduction
In 2010, Rob Perks argued twice for a greater appreciation of corporate and business oral history.1 He pointed out that oral history has become “preoccupied with the dispossessed and marginalised” as a result of British and European oral history’s origins. The (over)emphasis on the underprivileged was an attempt by British oral historians of the 1950s and 1960s to give a voice to the voiceless.2 They opposed the mid-century American top down oral history approach of Columbia University that was viewed as “‘the debriefing’ of the Great Men before they passed on.”3 The result was a socialistic theoretical bias that did not favor the institutions of capitalism: companies and elites. Paul Thompson famously wrote: “For the historian who wishes to work and write as a socialist, the task must be not simply to celebrate the working class as it is, but to raise its consciousness.”4 We do not wish to suggest that this socialistic anti-capitalist sentiment is still dominant within the current field of oral history; Thompson himself (with Cathy Courtney) wrote an oral history of the capitalist heart of the world: The City of London.5 Still, the assumption that “they [i.e., eminent people] had ample opportunity to have their voice or viewpoint heard,” as one widely used handbook on oral history claims, yet prevails, and we argue that it is erroneous.6 For decades now, corporations and elites have been regarded as having voices, perhaps even powerful ones. As a result, oral historians have failed to pay sufficient attention to these important historical actors in modern western societies.
The origins of European oral history explain why so little is published on corporate oral history,7 but that understanding in itself does not provide the tools to change this. In this article, we want to take a first step toward such change by arguing not only that it is valuable to use oral history in corporate organizational and elite research but also that the necessary methodological and theoretical arguments to do this are close to what oral historians already do. We do not wish a return to a “great (white) men” school of oral history. Instead, we only urge for a return to the fundamentals of high-quality oral history, to restore its ability to “learn to listen,” and to apply this to the field of business organizations and elites.8 If we learn to listen, new opportunities for interesting and important stories will present themselves to us and it will become apparent that business organizations and elites deserve to be better understood. Moreover, this will contribute to a real “historic turn” in organizational and leadership research.9 Oral historians have considerable experience in dealing with narrative structures, myths, emotion and trauma. These are qualities that could be used to restore the ties between (oral) business history and oral history, generally—to the betterment of both.

The step that we propose is supported by the four contributions that legitimize the use of oral history as formulated by Richard Crownshaw and Selma Leydesdorff. They believe that oral history is archival, scientific, democratic, and therapeutically useful.10 These principles hold true just as well for oral history research on organizations and elites. Below, we will first show that oral history can prove its archival relevance in organization and elite research. Subsequently, we will argue that close cooperation between organizational, business, and oral history strengthens the scientific soundness of oral history.11 We will also argue that proper oral histories of organizations and elites should not only be based on oral history’s experience with interdisciplinary research12 but also on the “Learning History” method—an oral history device used in organizational research.13 Next, we contend that oral history research on organizations contributes to oral history’s democratic and therapeutic principles as it offers the opportunity to lend a voice to misrepresented actors: the employees of the organizations involved. This could benefit and enrich current corporate history, which is dominated by a microeconomic and therefore (as some argue) undemocratic approach.14 In the final sections of this article, we will make clear that the democratic and therapeutic contributions of oral history also apply to studying leadership. Oral history offers leaders a chance to reflect and speak freely. In addition, its knowledge of silenced history and trauma15 can be of therapeutic use in the event of damnatio memoriae: the erasing of the leaders from the official organizational history, causing them to “lose” a part of their life story and harming the collective memory of the organizations involved.

In this article, we will use the results from our own organizational and elite oral history projects to illustrate the argument. In 2005, we researched the impact of the introduction of a new management vision to the local authorities of a major city in the Netherlands in the late 1990s. We approached the organization with questions like: how had the employees of the organization experienced this change, and did they in fact end up sharing this organizational vision? We interviewed civil servants, teachers, consultants, and members of the managing board who were responsible for the restructuring of the organization, the introduction of the new vision, and the establishment of a management learning program.

Between 2006 and 2009, we worked on a project that examined the effect of leadership change at Royal Philips Electronics, one of the largest electronics firms in the world. In the course of this project, we primarily focused on a reorganization program called Centurion (1990–96) that was the first forced mass reduction program on the European mainland. As a part of this program, every seventh employee was laid off, amounting to 55,000 discharges. Our research was based on exhaustive interviews with higher management members who had never before told their stories, even if they experienced this period in their lives as a deeply emotional time.
For our latest project on the history of leadership in business, administration, and politics, we interviewed representatives of the Dutch business, administrative, and political elite from between 1980 and 2010. We used their stories to gain insight in the history of leadership and in the differences between their personal story and the well-known public narratives.

The archival contribution
In order for historians to understand organizational and elite behavior, an archive is of the essence. In an oral world, however, new ways must be found to create archives. Oral history can greatly contribute to finding those new ways. Moreover, oral history can provide sources in a more timely fashion than conventional archives are able to provide them. It can take up to a century before government archives are opened. Consequently, oral history often offers the only sources available. Oral history projects on American presidents, for example, are important historical sources since “the White House operates largely as an oral culture. Although written decision memos are the norm, much of the most important business there occurs only in spoken, not written, words.” After the Nixon Watergate tapes, the threat of an impeachment procedure against President Ronald Reagan after E-mail messages from the White House in the Iran-Contra affair had become public, and the Kenneth Starr report on President Bill Clinton, the White House “has increasingly become a place resistant to keeping written records.”16

The same could be said for business. C. J. van der Klugt, President of Philips from 1986 to 1990, never used memos to manage his personnel. Instead, he engaged in small bilateral corridor talks with his management and staff. Although this was very typical for his management style, it would have gone unnoticed if one relied only on written documents. What's more, company archives are at best fragmentarily kept, often off-limits for outsiders (including researchers), offer only limited accessibility and are rarely well-catalogued.17 This does not phase oral historians, however, as archiving unwritten stories that were never recorded or that are as yet unavailable lies at the very heart of the discipline.18

Without a good oral history archive, it is difficult to understand and reconstruct why certain decisions were made in the past. This was one of the reasons for the aforementioned Dutch municipality to ask us to reconstruct the development and implementation of its management vision. The same was true for the Centurion program at Philips: the team of top managers and staff that coordinated and developed Centurion operated secretly and did not commit to paper their decisions or plans. As interviewees declared, “there was no master plan,” it “was not made in an office,” and it was not a “cut-and-dried” operation. Along the way, Philips managers came up with solutions in the course of talks or stumbled upon a solution on the shop floor, which was then passed along to a colleague. One can only understand this process through candid, detailed interviews with the people involved.

A scientific advancement: bridging the gap with business history
Historical research on (business) organizations and leadership is still viewed by many academic historians as not rigorous: seemingly not surpassing the level of a glossy hagiography on the occasion of a firm’s anniversary or the retirement of a CEO. The lack of historical consciousness, a discourse full of managerial and commercial jargon and the slick style of such corporate histories and elite biographies, form a fertile breeding ground for misinterpretation.19 Many (oral) historians do not regard business history as proper history. The task of bridging the gap between both fields can be compared to what Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack experienced when they began their research on women’s history. For them, one of the main problems was the “incomplete conversion from traditional to feminist historical paradigms.”20 When historians “learn to listen,” the managerial jargon and the slick style become much less of an obstacle. Moreover, it will become clear that the lack of historical consciousness of the oral histories provided by business historians is a relative notion.

Many private elite accounts are left unused because of misinterpretation. A historical account of the life of a business leader, such as a biography, is not seen as “real” history because it presumably lacks depth and scientific relevance.21 A leading organizational scientist has argued that “The books are composed largely of rather idiosyncratic, personal reflections and post hoc justifications for decisions, failures and personal outbursts. They had little to tell us about the processes and problems of managing. What they offer us are little more than banalities and truisms.”22 At the same time, (oral) historians do not pay a great deal of attention to the life stories of business leaders. A large oral history project on British North Sea Oil, for example, places the classic emphasis on the workers (“the Scottish coolies”), stating that the story of the executive is “often enough told.”23 Both the organizational scientists and these historians seem to overlook that the creation of a leader’s life story is a scientific process of oral history as well.24
Many elite and organizational histories are written by business historians. The discipline of business history is often seen as quite different from oral history. At the same time, however, it has been argued that business history was the first discipline to adopt oral history as a scientific method. As such, it was the study of business that lent authority and credibility to oral history as an academic tool for historical enquiry.25 Currently, oral history is scarcely used in the field of business history. It has lost its innovative function. As a result, theoretical and methodological innovations produced by oral history are missed in business history.26 This is one of the reasons that business history has lost its connection with other fields of history and is now often seen by them as “not real” scholarship.

In comparison to cultural or political history, oral history plays a marginal scientific role as well, albeit to a lesser extent than could be said of business history. This is regrettable and yet another incentive to stimulate cooperation between the two fields. After all, oral history and business history share many of the same challenges. Just like oral history in the 1970s and 1980s,27 business history is currently facing constant challenges regarding its historical merits in the use and selection of sources and modes of explanation. Similar challenges against oral history have led to an impressive list of publications. Alessandro Portelli, perhaps the foremost advocate of oral history, has very clearly demonstrated that oral history is scientifically sound.28 Debates justifying oral history have provided the discipline with a strong methodology and theory.29 Similarly, business history could gain both theoretically and methodologically from the outcomes of such debates. Oral history, on the other hand, could benefit from the abundant amount of material provided and collected by business historians. Many interesting oral history projects are set up by business historians, and there are national archives full of oral historical accounts. In the British Library, for example, oral archives pertaining to British Steel, UK oil and gas companies, the Post Office, and Tesco’s and Barings Bank are waiting for in-depth oral historical research.30

A second scientific advancement: the Learning History Method
The lack of oral historians’ attention for business history has made them largely unaware of the development of new oral history applications in the field of organizational studies—the Learning History Method, for example. The method of “Learning History” was introduced by Art Kleiner and George Roth, both organizational scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1997. The Learning History Method is based on the assumption that firms can learn from their mistakes by interviewing their employees, storing those memories, and presenting them in a historical narrative—the learning history. The method includes interviews with all actors: from shop floor to boardroom. For Kleiner and Roth, the learning history is “an emotionally rich, cogent story reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s unvarnished first-person accounts of American life and society.”31 With their reference to Terkel, Kleiner and Roth clearly illustrate that their approach derives from a common historiography.32 These origins are also evident from the way in which the interviews are conducted. An interview that is held in accordance with the Learning History Method starts with a very broad scope in which the interviewee talks quite freely about the research subject and their professional and personal life as it relates to the organization. The results are then analyzed by the researchers and (if available) compared to written sources, such as board statements, memoranda, and other forms of internal correspondence. Phase Two of the method consists of a second round of interviews, in which the interviewees are asked more specific questions and are confronted with official “facts.” These results are subsequently brought together in a narrative to be distributed and discussed among the coworkers. The narrative is intended to cause debate among the interviewees themselves, as well as between them and the interviewer. The third phase is quite literally a debate. Discussion meetings are organized and employees are asked, in-group sessions, to reflect on the history of the organization as presented in the learning history. The aim of the learning history is not only to learn from the past but also to learn from one another: to find out how interviewees and researchers describe themselves, higher management, and the organization as a whole. In that way, the method is valuable not only for the development and progress of the organizations involved but for oral history as well.33

The novel aspect of a learning history is that it separates between the narrative of the interviewee and the questions, comments, and influence of the interviewer by presenting them as strictly separate in different columns. In a learning history, you find the story of the interviewee presented unabridged in wide columns. On the left side are clarifications for the outsider in a narrow column; for example, on how the company hierarchy is built up or what an abbreviation means. More interesting is the second purpose of this narrow column: as a tool to present observations and questions of the researchers that are aimed to stimulate discussion and to counter facts. In a full column, facts and events are presented on which all the interviewees can agree or which are gathered from written sources (fig. 1).34
Adaptation of a separate presentation of the story of the interviewee and the comments, questions, and reflections of the interviewer should be an interesting addition to the repertoire of oral history. A separate presentation would visualize the role of the interviewer on the interviewee and provide a clearer view of the power relation between interviewer and interviewee, collaboration, censorship, and silence in the interview.35

It is remarkable that neither the method nor the learning histories that have resulted from it have been used by oral historians until now.36 Not only do learning histories provide interesting oral history accounts but also the interview methodology resembles the oral history method that has been described by Alexander von Plato. According to Von Plato, a proper interview should start with a focus on the life history of the interviewee. This will provide an insight into the subjective environment (Subjektivität) and the personal opinions of the interviewee. In other words, it will show what views people have of themselves and of their lives. This is a necessary phase because it offers proof to the interviewee of the fact that he is taken seriously by the interviewer: an academic outsider. Simultaneously, this phase offers an opportunity to the interviewer to “learn to listen” to the jargon and the expressions used by the interviewee. According to Von Plato, the next phase should consist of a second round of interviews that ask specific questions, and a third phase in which the researchers should contrast the interviews and the answers that they have provided with other sources and interviews. In the final phase, a debate (Streit) about the interview and the narrative should be central to the questions (table 1).37

Table 1. Comparing the method of the Learning History with the Oral History techniques of Von Plato
Phases of learning histories Phases of oral history (Von Plato)
1. Interview round on general questions 1. Interview round on general questions (Freilaufende Teil)
2. Interview round on specific questions and the interviewees view on “hard data”
3. Creating the narrative of the organization combining the interviews and hard data
4. Debate about the learning history 2. Interview round on specific questions (Einzelhinweise)
3. Comparing interviewee with known data
4. Debate (Streit)
 

Researchers who have created classical oral histories and researchers who have produced learning histories could learn from each other’s experiences, since both methods are based on the constant comparison between facts and counterfacts and between various subjective opinions and other sources. Furthermore, the most important scientific benefit of the Learning History Method for oral history is that it presents a tool with which the “official” (organizational) view can be justifiably combined with the counter-narrative of contrasting experiences of the interviewee(s) into one “grand narrative,” which leaves room for both views.38 A debate on doing justice to counter-narratives and opposing views in interviews was held in organization studies.39 This debate very much resembles the current debate on how to do justice to counter-narratives and silenced voices in oral history.40 At this point, the Learning History Method can strengthen the scientific soundness of oral history.

The democratic and therapeutic contribution of organizational oral history
Rob Perks has argued that “the primary imperatives and preoccupations of British oral history, crystallizing around the marginalized, the dispossessed and the disempowered has tended to exclude the study of other groups,” especially workforces in companies and organizations.41 Therefore, in the U.K. corporate organizational history is now a marginal field in oral history. The same holds true for all of Europe. Paying more attention to both the workforce and the executives of corporate organizations should make a contribution to oral history’s objective of having democratic merit. As Perks states: oral history should record the “hidden voices, particularly women’s changing roles in predominantly male work cultures, experiences otherwise little recorded and notably ignored by British business historians.”42 More than just teaching us about “women’s changing roles,” it will give us an insight into all people working in and for an organization: workforce, elite, men, and women.

The Learning History Method can make a positive contribution to the democratic task of oral history. The learning history of an organization has a traditional democratic effect as it pays attention to the various levels within that organization: middle management, lower management, and the shop floor. In learning histories, transcripts of the answers given by the people involved (ranging from factory line workers, secretaries, and customers to managing directors) are included. All of their stories are quoted directly. The contributors remain anonymous, however, and are only identified by their job description.43 In that sense, a learning history is very different from the traditional quick scans made by consultants. Consultants’ reports are rarely endorsed by those who experienced the events firsthand. The reports, after all, are intended for the senior managers who hired the consultants. Consultants’ reports do not provide sustainable organizational learning. The lessons that could be learned from the past leave when the consultants do and a new catchy management consultancy firm is hired.44 Such reports do not have a democratic purpose because they lack the methodological tools to produce critical oral histories.

The democratic benefit of oral history in doing organizational research is closely related to its therapeutic usefulness. During our research on organizational change at the Dutch municipality, we noticed that the people we were interviewing (who were all participating in a new management training program) seemed grateful that someone was listening to them. “I can sometimes be very lonely here,” a middle manager confessed to us. “In this division, when I try to change something, all I get is resistance. I can only share my feelings with outsiders, or during meetings with middle managers of other divisions, because then I can feel safe.” In the course of our Philips research, we witnessed the same willingness to testify. Many employees experienced their participation as an opportunity to tell their story. It happened several times that, after hours of being interviewed, managers still did not have the feeling that “their” story was told. As one of them told us with much insistence, “For you the conversation may seem over, but for me it is not. There are a lot of things left to be said.”

There are several reasons why organizational experiences can have such a deep impact on someone’s private life. Reorganization and restructuring belong in the top ten traumatic life experiences a person can encounter.45 Unemployment scores even higher than divorce or martial separation on this list of top ten traumas.46 An enquiry by the largest Dutch labor union, the Federation of Dutch Employers’ Organizations (Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging), showed that 41 percent of those surveyed experienced health complaints because they were subjected to reorganization at their work place—particularly stress and insomnia. According to a quarter of the interviewees, these complaints were the result of a lack of information given to employees and the failure to have general meetings in which to discuss the reasons for restructuring the organization.47 This correlation between the lack of information and stress levels is confirmed by earlier research.48 Consequently, giving people a voice in organizations can not only reveal a lack of democracy within that organization but can also shed light on personal traumatic and emotional experiences.

In the course of our oral history project on Philips, we observed three periods of stress and trauma during the process of reorganization called Centurion (1990–96). The first episode concerned the shock resulting from the acknowledgment by the highest management that Philips was indeed having economic troubles and could potentially face bankruptcy. A “sense of urgency” was established in a weekend-long session at the conference center De Ruwenberg where top management was literally locked up and “plunged into a valley of death,” as the main consultant of Centurion put it. At the start of the weekend, the top 120 members of Philips’ senior management were shown a press release from the Financial Times that stated Philips was bankrupt. Only the leading consultant and then Philips president, Jan Timmer, knew the press release was fake. They used it to invoke a feeling of crisis, which they hoped would result in a willingness to change. The message took the participants by surprise. No one was in a position to check the validity of the press release since Wall Street was closed over the weekend and contact with the outside world was not allowed. President Timmer gave a highly rhetorical speech with strong emotional overtones. One interviewee told us:

You just feel shocked, but you can’t run away. We were locked up in De Ruwenberg. When Timmer spoke you could not even walk away to make a phone call. We sat for hours in an arena-shaped room while that man explained, using words that hurt like whiplashes, what was wrong with the organization. I left with my tail between my legs; the atmosphere was that of a funeral.
Once a sense of urgency had been achieved, the top managers agreed to lay off 55,000 employees: every seventh worker. Most of these employees had spent their entire working lives at Philips, just like their fathers and grandfathers. They felt like they belonged to a family, like they were among friends. The company was an essential part of their private life. A division director told us that he held seventy-five meetings in just one week with employees whom he had to lay off.
These people, whom he had known for years, asked him: “‘How did it get this bad? Have you been sleeping?’ I tried to make them understand, but in their eyes I was guilty.” After one of those talks, he was attacked by angry employees as he was shopping with his wife in the city center. It was without doubt a traumatic experience for him.

The third period of trauma took place during the process of revitalization following the reduction in labor force. During this process, middle management was kept under high pressure by deliberately sandwiching them between their workers and upper management. It was the adage of the president of Philips that “change is emotion, and emotion is show.” According to Timmer, the restructuring of Philips would fail if people lost the emotionally charged sense of urgency. For many employees, however, this was a long, stressful, and traumatic time that they were only able to talk about during the oral history interviews.

The democratic and therapeutic contribution of elite oral history
Although we often think of leaders as people who have ample opportunity to bring their story forward, they frequently feel misrepresented.49 During their active period as leaders, they feel controlled by media, shareholders, political parties, or the company and cannot speak freely. In our oral history project on leadership, the CEO of a multinational company told us how he always had to be very careful choosing his words and how he had little opportunity to talk in confidence. This was especially true in those instances when he was meeting major shareholders or at investment banks in London:

You’ve got numerous one-on-ones, conferences and lunches, which all have to be prepared. And you must read up enormously, because in those one-on-ones you can never mention something to a shareholder that is unknown to others—especially not when the company is in crisis. Because then you run a giant risk, with all those law suits. You have to learn it all by heart. They give you these hefty manuals when you go on a road show. I always read those. Not because I have given false information, but to establish what knowledge is already in the public domain. . . . You would never be able to talk privately in the city. There was always one person of Investor Relations present, and often more than one. The only thing to do then is to make sure that you don’t say something which is not yet known in the public domain. And if you do mention something that is unknown, then you must immediately issue a press release.

A CEO of a financial firm told us:

When you work in such a public, well-known company then—after a short honeymoon—you become part of the slaughter. Those journalistic attacks start very early and they just keep on going. That is true for big companies, but also for small companies. The boss can be very lonely because he lacks a dialogue with equals and will therefore never get any feedback.
Oral history has shown its democratic effects by offering those isolated leaders an opportunity to speak freely about their experiences. What is more, leaders were very willing to speak with well-prepared academic oral historians. One business historian explained why these leaders would be so “appallingly frank”:

For many senior figures from industry it is lonely at the top: I think when they have someone listening to them who is interested and knowledgeable—and above all someone like an academic historian who is not a threat—they are only too glad to have the chance to open their mind.50
The leaders did not like to be interviewed by journalists: almost all of them told us that spontaneously. They agreed to be interviewed by us because we represented academia, had thoroughly prepared our conversation, and possessed a lot of knowledge about their specific company or career. In preparation, we had read all available newspaper interviews, histories, reports, and articles. This helped us to structure the interview and incite anecdotes and explanations, but it also functioned to convey that we were truly interested in their (life) stories, which in turn helped to establish trust.51 Lim How Seng is correct when he states that “solid knowledge of the person, events and the major actors is therefore essential.”52

Other elite oral history projects have already shown that the interviewees were “open, friendly and enthusiastic about the opportunity being offered them.” They were willing to testify and felt the urge “to justify their career to themselves as well as to history.”53 We encountered similar responses by our interviewees. One former police commissioner told us, for example:
When you look up my achievements then you will find: “the policy-affair, the airplane crash and the police raids in the south-east quarter.” In short, everything that got into the public domain. But nowhere do you find that I changed the police corps and made the city safer.
When we subsequently asked him if being remembered correctly was important he answered:
Well, important . . . It would flatter my vanity if it would be written down. But it is also of public interest that this is written down. The fact that anybody would know that it was me who organized the force in such a way that, in terms of safety, the maximum was achieved: that’s relevant, in my opinion. And it would also be relevant for police officers. Many of them don’t even know this.

In fact many of the leaders we interviewed commented on how the same quotes kept returning in articles about them and how facts proven wrong were continuously reprinted. A former political party leader said:

I did not abolish the party council, but my predecessor did. This is a terrible misunderstanding. I have often called such a reporter and told him, “You don’t know your facts. That happened in the congress of ’91, when I was not even elected yet, it was suggested by my predecessors. And because you are writing this down . . . You must know your facts!” But it never stopped.
Many of them saw their oral history interview as an opportunity to finally tell their side of the story. These oral history projects on elites function democratically in the same way as the social oral history projects did for workers and women in the early days of the History Workshop.54 In addition, the democratic contribution of oral history on leaders also becomes evident when it helps to demystify popular myths surrounding well-known CEO’s or concepts like leadership and entrepreneurship.55

Another example of the therapeutic benefit of oral history: damnatio memoriae
Oral history offers an opportunity for leaders to speak about difficult periods in their professional lives, especially when they have retired and have the time to reflect on their own past. As is clear from the police commissioner’s comments, leaders in general are afraid that their acts and contributions will be misunderstood, or even worse, forgotten. This is not only a matter of arrogance or of thinking that their life has been interesting enough to be remembered in history. In extreme cases, neglecting someone’s contributions can be a case of damnatio memoriae.
Damnatio memoriae is the ancient practice—most common during the Roman imperial period—of damning or condemning an individual’s memory. Their fame and reputation were canceled, condemned, and literally written out of history.56

Damnatio memoriae was a formal sanction by the Senate to posthumously destruct the memory—understood as the very essence of being—of bad emperors like Nero or Caligula by removing them from history and from the collective consciousness of society.57 This destruction consisted of removing the names of the offenders from official lists, burning their books, proclaiming their birthday as a day of evil, and most famously by chiseling their names and portraits away from monuments and mutilating the faces of their statues.
Damnatio memoriae has also had its effect on historical and biographical texts, which can be considered “a deliberate rewriting . . . of history and society [by means] of the emperor’s evil deeds and moral inadequacies.”58 It is even suggested that texts formed the preferred instruments of choice for damnatio memoriae because mutilated statues could be replaced, but texts could never entirely be evoked.59 Through this sanctioning mechanism, a new authoritative narrative of the past was shaped by a new generation to control the past.60 Damnatio memoriae not only has consequences for the public reputation of a leader, but—as is to be expected—considering the traumatic effects of dismissal, it also has a far-reaching impact on the private life of the damned leader, his family, and his descendants.

In our oral history project on leadership, we witnessed this damnatio memoriae in a modern form: not posthumously, but aimed at active people who made an unfortunate slip (in the eyes of the public and of journalists) for which they were ostracized, condemned, ridiculed and deprived of their part in history. One Dutch example comes from a successful minister who became the chairman of a corporation after his public service ended. Shortly afterward the corporation went bankrupt. After his subsequent sudden removal from office, he entered a stage of, what he called in his autobiography, “public death”:
This writing comes to you from the societal hereafter. There is indeed a life after public death. The road to it is grim and hard going. Unfortunately, you see many miserable people along the road who are exhausted and just can’t go on. The tragedy is that these are often young people, in the prime of their lives. They have collapsed under the heavy weight of a path on which they had a societal life with a job, friends and girlfriends, money and expectations . . . and have come to a life without society, without expectations for the future, without friends and with only spare time. Nobody really helps them. It is tragic and unnatural.61

A former CEO with whom we spoke with told us about a time when he had to step down as a manager and became the public embodiment of bad management—especially after a book was published about his “mistakes.” He had spent his entire working life at the company, starting as a middle manager and working his way up to CEO, that he had been forced to leave. Then, quite suddenly, he was knocked off his perch, forced to leave:

You must imagine that I was literally bullied for months by the boys of the late night talk shows. In the end they offered me the complete hour of their show, I would be the only guest, just to let me tell my story. But I decided: I won’t do it. I’m not doing anyone a favor by doing that, starting with myself. Let the myth live on. I’m not going to try and put it right, because it’s hopeless.
Well, I was of course considered a scoundrel in corporate Holland and corporate life. So the way in which colleagues and commissioners reacted—and the way in which later all of corporate Holland reacted—was by ignoring me, by not inviting me to join supervisory boards. I can cope with that rationally. I was a part of that world, so I was not surprised. But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t hurt by it on a personal level. Because I think I did not deserve that at all. It was completely undeserved. And when you see which losers are then all offered decent commissioners positions . . . . So yes, it hurts. It’s very unpleasant. But like I said: It is not that I cannot understand it. I can rationalize it and therefore I can live with it.

When you are the CEO [of this company] . . . you are an important man in the Netherlands. It doesn’t matter who holds the post, or if they like you or not, that doesn’t matter. You are important and people act in a way that fits that importance. Then, when the moment comes for you to retire, even if you were decent and venerated, you cease to be that important man. That black hole, that fracture will come inevitably. But under normal circumstances it is a gentle touch down, with a few plush commissioners’ positions, for status only. The fact that you are expelled is annoying. It hurts, that does hurt.

The same can be said for another former CEO who had to resign after many years of success due to charges of fraud. After several years of proceedings, he was cleared on almost every point by the court, but by that time the damage to his personal position was irreversible:
The people around me tell me that they think that I’m rehabilitated. But does the general public see me differently? I don’t think so. That will never be fixed. I am a persona non grata.
When we subsequently asked him how he thought he would be remembered in history, he told us:
To be honest, I haven’t thought about how I will be remembered. In the past [before his dismissal] I did think about it when I was CEO, but now I can’t do that anymore. Because everything has become so unmistakably futile.

In fact, he told us, that he did not dare to think of his own remembrance. He could not face his own past nor think about his successful years of leadership and de facto he damnatio memoriae on him. Still, like the other CEOs, he longs to be rehabilitated. All of the aforementioned CEOs were grateful that academic historians were willing to listen to them, allowing them a chance to tell their story without being subject to judgment.
From the perspective of oral history, these interviews offer an extraordinary opportunity to compare “official” history with personal stories. After all, many leaders are historical actors in jubilee volumes, historical narratives, and public memory. Moreover, oral history accounts of elites offer us a chance to learn about the role of emotion and trauma in the business and elite world, which is an underdeveloped theme so far. Oral historians can take the lead in further developing this theme, as they are professionally trained, interested in life stories and have the capability to deal with emotion and trauma.

Conclusion
In this article, we have shown how oral history can benefit from (and be enriched by) paying attention to developments in the field of organizational research and business history, as well as by creating oral histories of business organizations and leaders. Such a “next step” broadens the scope of the traditional field of interest of oral history. Significantly, it is consistent with all four principles of oral history: making archival, scientific, democratic, and therapeutic contributions. Oral history can contribute to a “historic turn” in organizational and leadership research in business history and so bridge the gap between business history and oral history. Conversely, oral history can profit from business history’s oral history accounts and archives.
We have argued that a great deal of information is not written down in organizations or about leaders. As oral culture becomes increasingly important, oral historians have to take responsibility for creating archives. Also, life stories of leaders and members of organizations are often neglected by oral historians, as are slick corporate histories, because business history is regarded as unscientific by many oral historians. These results in two detrimental effects on oral history practitioners: they forget to pay attention to methodological developments within business and organizational history and they overlook many interesting oral business archives. Once oral historians take up their adagio of “learn to listen,” for example by connecting Alexander von Plato’s work with the Learning History Method, a great dealt of exciting oral history projects on organizations and leadership will be initiated.

Using oral history for research on leadership and for the development and progress of organizations is democratic. We have shown that the Learning History Method is indeed democratic because—in contrast to the quick scans by consultants—representatives of all levels of the organization are taken into account and approached critically. After the construction of its narrative, an organization can comment on the process and the narrative in an effort to make that narrative everyone’s story, making it available for both scientific and organizational learning. Moreover, we have argued that leaders seldom feel free to speak on every issue during their active careers and that it is difficult for them to reflect upon public perceptions of them.
Finally, oral histories of business organizations and leaders are of therapeutic value as well. Through oral history, people from all segments of an organization are offered an opportunity to testify. Many were eager to do so because it gave them a chance to talk about traumatic experiences. Organizational change is one of the most traumatic life experiences one can encounter, certainly in an environment where people do not feel safe. The farthest reaching therapeutic use of oral history became apparent when leaders were interviewed who had faced damnatio memoriae. This made clear that oral historians possess the necessary tools for analysis of organizations and leaders.

 

Sjoerd Keulen and Ronald Kroeze
Correspondence to be sent to: E-mail: S.J.Keulen@uva.nl and dbr.kroeze@let.vu.nl

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Sjoerd Keulen is a Ph.D. candidate and teaches courses on Dutch history at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His doctoral research focuses on the history of policy and activities of Dutch public administration in relation to society, business, and politics between 1945 and 2000.

Ronald Kroeze is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer in political history at the VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the history of good governance, corruption, and leadership in politics and business in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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NOTES
This article was presented at the European Social Science History Conference April 13–16, 2010, in Ghent, Belgium. We would like to thank the participants in the conference for their comments and suggestions, especially Rob Perks. We would also like to thank Selma Leydesdorff for her inspiring master class Oral History in 2009 at the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch graduate school for cultural history.

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1 Rob Perks, “The Roots of Oral History: Exploring Contrasting Attitudes to Elite, Corporate, and Business Oral History in Britain and the U.S.,” The Oral History Review 37, no. 2 (2010): 215–24; Rob Perks, “‘Corporations Are People Too!’: Business and Corporate History in Britain,” Oral History 38, no. 1 (2010): 36–54.
2 Perks “Corporations Are People Too,” 36.
3 Michael Frisch, “Oral History and Hard Times: A Review Essay,” in The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Paul Thompson, 32 (New York: Routledge, 2004).
4 Paul Thompson, Voices of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 17.
5 Cathy Courtney and Paul Thompson, City Lives: The Changing Voices of British Finance (London: Methuen, 1996).
6 Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 161.
7 For an overview, see Perks, “The Roots of Oral History.”
8 Kathryn Anderson and Dana C. Jack, “Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analysis,” in Women’s Worlds: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, 15 (New York: Routledge, 1991).
9 See Peter Clark and Michael Rowlinson, “Treatment of History in Organization Studies: Towards an ‘historic turn’?,” Business History 46, no. 3 (2004): 331–52; or the special issue on historical approaches of the Journal of Organizational Change Management 22, no. 1 (2009).
10 Richard Crownshaw and Selma Leydesdorff, Introduction to the Transaction Edition, “On Silence and Revision: The Language and Words of the Victims,” in Memory and Totalitarianism, ed. Luisa Passerini, vii–xvii (London: Transaction, 2004).
11 Martin Parker, “Contesting Histories: Unity and Division in a Building Company,” Journal of Organizational Change Management 15, no. 6 (2004): 589–605; Sharon Topping, David Duhonand, and Stephen Bushardt, “Oral History as a Classroom Tool: Learning Management Theory from the Evolution of an Organization,” Journal of Management History 12, no. 2 (2006): 154–66.
12 Thompson, Voice of the Past, 59, 60.
13 For a criticism on methodology in business history, see Michael Rowlinson et al., “The Uses of History as Corporate Knowledge,” in The Evolution of Business Knowledge, ed. Harry Scarbrough, 340 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
14 Dvora Yanow, How Does a Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996), 225–27, 235, 236.
15 The Journal of the International Oral History Association is called Words and Silences to stress that both elements have the same importance. Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff, and Graham Dawson, eds., Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1999).
16 Russell L. Riley, “Presidential Oral History: The Clinton Presidential History Project,” Oral History Review 34, no. 2 (2007): 86–89.
17 Carl Ryant, “Oral History and Business History,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (1988): 562.
18 For example, Nancy MacKay, Curating Oral Histories: From Interview to Archive (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007).
19 Sjoerd Keulen and Ronald Kroeze, “Understanding Management Gurus and Historical Narratives: The Benefits of a Historic Turn in Management and Organization Studies,” Organizational History and Management 7, no. 2 (2012).
20 Anderson and Jack, “Learning to Listen,” 15.
21 Ben Gales and Pim Kooij, “De Nederlandse ondernemersbiografie in het perspectief van tijd en theorie,” in De ondernemersbiografie, ed. Jacques van Gerwen, Marcel Metze and Hans Renders (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Boom, 2008).
22 David Collins, Organizational Change: Sociological Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2004), 39.
23 Terry Brotherstone and Hugo Manson, “North Sea Oil, Its Narratives and Its History: An Archive of Oral Documentation and the Making of Contemporary Britain,” Northern Scotland 27 (2007): 26, 34, 36–37.
24 Alexander von Plato, “Zeitzeugen und die historische Zunft: Erinnerung, kommunikative Tradierung und kollektives Gedächtnis in der qualitativen Geschichtswissenschaft—ein Problemaufriss,” Bios 13, no. 1 (2000): 26–27.
25 Patrick Fridenson, “Business History and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Business History, ed. Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin, 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Anthony Seldon and Joanna Rappoworth, By Word of Mouth: ‘Élite’ Oral History (London: Methuen, 1983), 153–58.
26 Note the unreflective use of historiography and linear use of methodology in Marilynn Collins and Robert Bloom, “The Role of Oral History in Accounting,” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 4, no. 4 (1991): 23–31; Theresa Hammond and Prem Sikka, “Radicalizing Accounting History: The Potential of Oral History,” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 9, no. 3 (1996): 79–97; Michelle Emery, Jill Hooks, and Ross Stewart, “Born at the Wrong Time? An Oral History of Women Professional Accountants in New Zealand,” Accounting History 7, no. 2 (2002): 7–34.
27 See for example the reprint of the 1975 article: Ronald Gele, “Movement without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History,” in Perks and Thompson, eds., The Oral History Reader.
28 Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 45–59.
29 For example, see Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Marta Kurkowska-Budzan and Krzystof Zamorski, eds., Oral History: The Challenges of Dialogue (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009).
30 After five years of extensive interviews, an archive was created for North Sea Oil, but the historical analysis has yet to be done: Brotherstone and Manson, “North Sea Oil,” 39–41. For an overview of the companies, see the British Library National life Stories Web site: http://www.bl.uk/nls.
31 Art Kleiner and George Roth, “How to Make Experience Your Company’s Best Teacher,” Harvard Business Review 75, no. 5 (1997): 175–76.
32 Frisch, “Oral History and Hard Times.”
33 Art Kleiner and George Roth, Car Launch: The Human Side of Managing Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 179–213; Art Kleiner et al., Oil Change: Perspectives on Corporate Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), 183–87.
34 Kleiner and Roth, Car Launch, 5–7.
35 Annmarie Turnbull, “Collaboration and Censorship in the Oral History Interview,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 3, no. 1 (2000): 15–34.
36 For example, the learning history of Oil Change or Car Launch, with interesting quotations and reflections on emotional processes has not yet been analyzed by oral historians.
37 von Plato, “Zeitzeugen und die historische Zunft,” 22.
38 John Bodnar, “Power and Memory in Oral History: Workers and Managers at Studebaker,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (1989): 1203–04; Agnès Delahaye et al., “The Genre of Corporate History,” Journal of Organizational Change Management 22, no. 2 (2009): 39–40.
39 Barbara Czarniawska and Pasquale Gagliardi, eds., Narratives We Organize By (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003).
40 David Boje, Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research (London: Sage, 2001); Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews, eds., Considering Counter-Narratives: Narrating, Resisting, Making Sense (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004).
41 Perks, “Corporations Are People Too,” 49.
42 Ibid., 41.
43 Philip Mirvis, Karin Ayas, and George Roth, To the Desert and Back: The Dramatic Story of the Greatest Change Effort on Record (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2004).
44 Kleiner and Roth, “How to Make Experience Your Company’s Best Teacher,” 173.
45 Stefan P. Spera, Eric D. Burhfeind, and James W. Pennebaker, “Expressive Writing and Coping with Job Loss,” Academy of Management Journal 37, no. 3 (1994): 722–33.
46 Andrew E. Clark and Andrew J. Oswald, “Unhappiness and Unemployment,” The Economic Journal 104 (1994): 648–59.
47 Jan Warning, Ziek door onzekerheid (Utrecht, The Netherlands: FNV Bondgenoten, 2009).
48 M. V. Millerand and S. K. Hoppe, “Attributions for Job Termination and Psychological Distress,” Human Relations 47, no. 3 (1994): 307–26.
49 Abrams, Oral History Theory, 161.
50 Seldon and Rappoworth, By Word of Mouth, 158.
51 David Riesman, quoted in Lewis Anthony Dexter, Elite and Specialized Interviewing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 5; Conor McGrath, “Oral History and Political Elites: Interviewing (and Transcribing) Lobbyists,” in Oral History, ed. Kurkowska-Budzan and Zamorski, 49; Sofie Strandén, “Trust in the Empathic Interview,” in Oral History, ed. Kurkowska-Budzan and Zamorski, 9–11; Jeffrey M. Berry, “Validity and Reliability Issues in Elite Interviewing,” PS: Political Science and Politics 35, no. 4 (2002): 681.
52 Lim How Seng, “Interviewing the Business and Political Élite of Singapore: Methods and Problems,” in Oral History in Southeast Asia: Theory and Method, ed. Patricia Lim Pui Huen, James H. Morrison, and Kwa Chong Guan, 64 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998).
53 Yos Santasombat, “Oral history and Self-Portraits: Interviewing the Thai Élite,” in Oral History in Southeast Asia, ed. Lim Pui Huen et al., 69.
54 Selma Leydesdorff, De mensen en de woorden. Geschiedenis op basis van verhalen (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Meulenhoff, 2004), 24–29.
55 Ronald Mitchell, “Oral History and Expert Scripts: Demystifying the Entrepreneurial Experience,” International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research 3, no. 2 (1997): 122–39.
56 Eric R. Varner, Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 1–21.
57 Friedrich Vittinghoff, Der Staatsfeind in der römischen Kaiserzeit: Untersuchungen zur ‘damnatio memoriae’ (Berlin, Germany: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1936), 12–42.
58 Varner, Mutilation and Transformation, 7.
59 Ibid., 8.
60 Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 276–83.
61 Berend-Jan Udink, Tekst en uitleg. Over sturen en gestuurd worde, ervaringen in politiek en bedrijf (Baarn, The Netherlands: Anthos, 1986), 274.

sourse: Oral History Review, Volume 39, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2012, pp. 15-36

 
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