The past – precious asset, sweet burden or a curse?
Sylwia Ciuk, Polish Academy of Sciences
Cut-throat competition and a strong drive for results force most of the listed companies to produce extremely ambitious growth plans, set almost unrealistic sales targets and later do everything in their power to deliver on their promise. The shareholders are interested solely in the bottom-line and a good return on their investment. Share prices and the magic word dividend is the most compelling argument underpinning the company’s current and planned activities. In such competitive environment, where the past in confined to the latest sales figures and understood as the last quarter’s results, where all day-to-day activities revolve round future goals, the room for celebrating the past starts to shrink dramatically. The past is recalled on the rare occasions of annual meetings or during informal get-togethers of company’s dinosaurs that have resisted the temptation to job hop. Such high pace of market changes and the pressure to constantly tailor oneself to shifting customer moods consumes most of the company’s energy. Aware of the warning that most prominent business gurus give: change or die, the imperative of incessant change rests usually unchallenged. What is then the role of the past here? Is it of any use any longer? What is the point of celebrating the forgone, the outdated, the invalid? If the answer, in the eyes of the management, can be translated into figures, the question seems rhetorical. If tradition does not add value to the company, it is erased from presentations, speeches, talks, e-mails - it becomes invisible, it dies.
In this paper I would like to address the question of the past and the role it plays in modern multinational companies. I will present two organizations and their strikingly different attitude to their history. I will attempt to shed more light on the approaches to the past. In the first, the past is treated as a villain, as a burden, as a challenge and a task for the new generation of managers who have to cope with its repercussions. In the other case the past is cherished, commemorated, used as a tool to educate and pull together the old and the new group members. I will refer to two organizations I have examined doing ethnographic research into their corporate cultures. I will describe their cultures using the theoretical framework of the interpretative paradigm (Morgan and Burell, 1979), where the social reality is constructed by social actors that agree upon its meaning in interactions (Weick1969). I will treat organizations as cultures that will be my root epistemological metaphor (Smircich 1983, Morgan 1986/1997).
The organizations I will be presenting are both big multinationals with good position on the global and Polish market. They operate on the same sector – the pharmaceutical industry – and have the same American origins, yet their tradition bears little resemblance. One is an embodiment and advocate of overall and constant change, where the employees with more seniority humorously describe themselves as “members of the losers’ club”. The other is proudly and deeply rooted in its tradition which is an inherent element of its present and future. Seniority enhances employees’ prestige and is something to be proud of. In this paper I will attempt to pinpoint the major factors that affect the way tradition might be perceived in various organizational settings.
References
Morgan, G., Burell G. (1979): Sociological paradigms and organizational analysis. London: Heinemann.
Morgan, G. (1986/ 1997): Obrazy organizacji (Images of organization). Warszawa: PWN.
Smircich, L. (1983): "Studying Organizations as cultures." (in:) Morgan, G. (ed.) Beyond method: Strategies for social research. Beverly Hills-London-New Dehli: Sage, p. 160-172
Weick, K. E. (1969): The social psychology of organizing. Reading: Addison-Wesley