Organizational memorialization: spatial history and legitimation as chiasms
Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management
ISSN: 1746-5648
Article publication date: 3 November 2020
Issue publication date: 23 February 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand how historical materialities might play a contemporary role in legitimation processes through the memorialization of history and its reproduction in the here-and-now of organizations and organizing.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors briefly review the existing management and organization studies (MOS) literature on legitimacy, space and history; engage with the work of Merleau-Ponty to explore how organizational legitimacy is managed in time and space; and use the case of two Parisian universities to illustrate the main arguments of the paper.
Findings
The paper develops a history-based phenomenological perspective on legitimation processes constitutive of four possibilities identified by means of chiasms: heterotopic spatial legacy, thin spatial legacy, institutionalized spatial legacy and organizational spatial legacy.
Research limitations/implications
The authors discuss the implications of this research for the neo-institutional literature on organizational legitimacy, research on organizational space and the field of management history.
Originality/value
This paper takes inspiration from the work of Merleau-Ponty on chiasms to conceptualize how the temporal layers of space and place that organizations inhabit and inherit (which we call “spatial legacies”), in the process of legitimation, evoke a sensible tenor.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Citation
de Vaujany, F.-X., Vaast, E., Clegg, S.R. and Aroles, J. (2021), "Organizational memorialization: spatial history and legitimation as chiasms", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 76-97. https://doi.org/10.1108/QROM-01-2020-1887
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited