Legacy and Change: Moving Between History and Imagined Futures in Organizations

The book provides insights on managing legacy and change in organizations from some of the pioneering researchers in the field. It explores how past legacies both enable and restrict opportunities for organizational renewal, social change, and new forms of organizing. On the one hand, tangible and intangible legacies can be a source of authentication, legitimation, and strategy restoration; on the other hand, past legacies can restrict our imagination by enforcing path dependency.

Managing legacy is a vital process for both old and new organizations. Older organizations often find that their legacy is at odds with present realities or future directions. In contrast, newly formed organizations often feel they have a deficit in legacy compared with long-established organizations and seek to boost credibility by engaging in activities that can be retrospectively claimed as their legacy. In either case, when aspects of an organization’s raison d’être change, the organizational identity is threatened, and legacy can become an obstacle or an opportunity.

By bringing together varied perspectives on legacy, including heritage, collective memory, rhetorical history, storytelling, and imprinting theory, this volume contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay of legacies and imagined futures as it pertains to organizational identity and change.

Hamid Foroughi is Associate Professor in Responsible Management at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. He currently serves as a senior editor for Leadership and a media review editor for Organization Studies. His research delves into the historical turn in organization studies, offering insights into the processes of organizing, identities, legitimation, and change across diverse empirical contexts. He is best known for his contribution to the study of collective memory in management. He has published extensively on these topics in internationally leading journals, such as Academy of Management Annals, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Academy of Management Learning and Education, and Journal of World Business.

Dr. Andrea Casey is Associate Professor Emerita of Human and Organizational Learning at The George Washington University, where she taught doctoral courses in organizational culture, organizational dynamics, and research. Her research interests include organizational memory and history and identity-related theories such as organizational and professional identity. Her recent books include Organizational Identity and Memory: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Routledge) and New Directions in Organizational and Management History (De Gruyter). She has served on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management and as Division Chair for the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division. Before joining the George Washington University faculty, Dr. Casey was a consultant focusing on organizational change, strategic planning, and leadership development.

Dr. Sonia Coman is the Director of Digital Engagement at Washington National Cathedral. She leads the institution’s digital transformation and serves on the core team of The World Innovation Network, where she advises on visual content strategy. She has a PhD from Columbia University, where she brought social network analysis to bear on a transcultural art study. Dr. Coman is the co-author of the book New Directions in Organizational and Management History. Her research focuses on the intersection of art, business, and history. She has published extensively on creativity and distinctiveness and on legacy and organizational history in internationally recognized journals and edited volumes.