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

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.

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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