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.

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.

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).

To be continued...

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

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



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