Ronald B. Shuman Award for MH Division Best Student Paper
Existing research emphasizes how organizations construct historical narratives to shape identities, gain legitimacy, and envision futures. Such literature typically focuses inwards, on how organizational actors purposefully select organizational pasts to construct their historical narratives. However, organizational actors are not the only authors of their historical narratives; outsiders (e.g. political parties, interest groups) promote a plethora of alternative historical narratives, sometimes even contradictory ones, battling to influence the organization’s future. Despite its relevance, organizational scholars underplayed the role of outsiders in the development of historical narratives, leaving this phenomenon understudied and undertheorized. Evoking Bakhtin’s concepts of polyphony, dialogism and memories of the future, our study investigates how outsiders construct historical narratives to influence Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link – a major infrastructure project, to construct the world's largest immersed tunnel linking Denmark and Germany, which, as any temporary organization, starts with no history of its own, and over time gain pasts while projecting its future. We identify three forms of historical narrative construction: progression, accumulation, and reoccurrence. Progression frames the project as part of an unbroken historical trajectory. Accumulation selectively recall past experiences to guide future actions, while reoccurrence projects patterns from past projects onto the current one. Our research contributes to the literature on organizational history, time, and temporality by revealing how outsiders construct a history through future-oriented historical narratives, actively shaping and legitimizing ongoing trajectories while creating organizational pasts where none previously existed.
