Organizational Memorialization: Spatial History and Legitimation as Chiasms

François-Xavier de Vaujany (), Emmanuelle Vaast, Stewart Clegg and Jeremy Aroles ()
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François-Xavier de Vaujany: DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Jeremy Aroles: Durham Business School - Durham University

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Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to understand how historical materialities might play a contemporary role in legitimation processes through the memorialization of history and its reproduction in the here-and-now of organizations and organizing.The authors briefly review the existing management and organization studies (MOS) literature on legitimacy, space and history; engage with the work of Merleau-Ponty to explore how organizational legitimacy is managed in time and space; and use the case of two Parisian universities to illustrate the main arguments of the paper.The paper develops a history-based phenomenological perspective on legitimation processes constitutive of four possibilities identified by means of chiasms: heterotopic spatial legacy, thin spatial legacy, institutionalized spatial legacy and organizational spatial legacy.The authors discuss the implications of this research for the neo-institutional literature on organizational legitimacy, research on organizational space and the field of management history.This paper takes inspiration from the work of Merleau-Ponty on chiasms to conceptualize how the temporal layers of space and place that organizations inhabit and inherit (which we call "spatial legacies"), in the process of legitimation, evoke a sensible tenor.

Keywords: Space; time; Spatial legacy; Merleau-Ponty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Published in Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 2021, 16 (1), pp.76-97. ⟨10.1108/QROM-01-2020-1887⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03346954

DOI: 10.1108/QROM-01-2020-1887

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