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Organizational memorialization: spatial history and legitimation as chiasms

François-Xavier de Vaujany (Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL, Paris, France)
Emmanuelle Vaast (Faculty of Management, McGill University Desautels, Montreal, Canada)
Stewart R. Clegg (University of Technology Sydney, UTS Business School, Ultimo, Australia) (Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Campus de Campolide, Lisbon, Portugal)
Jeremy Aroles (Durham University Business School, Durham, UK)

Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management

ISSN: 1746-5648

Article publication date: 3 November 2020

Issue publication date: 23 February 2021

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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

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