Research on business history has shown that strategists can create futures through strategically constructing pasts. However, what remains unclear is why some businesses are able to successfully leverage their past while others are not. Through a combination of historical research and an in-depth case study of Atkinson’s, a 187-year-old UK family business in the food and beverage trade, we find that rhetorical history involves the construction of past and personal visions to create a future of the past through not simply story-telling but through several future-making practices. In doing so, we theorize the links between rhetorical history and future-making by explaining how rhetorical history constructs the future. We contribute to both rhetorical history and future-making literature by combining and introducing the discussion of temporality.
