‘Changing the Course of a Super Tanker’: A Study of Senior and Junior Managers’ Enactments of a Transition Narrative

This paper investigates how a mnemonic community of a senior and junior generation of frontline managers, respectively with first-hand and second-hand memories of the organizational past, enact a shared historical transition narrative as part of their everyday practice of change management in a Scandinavian telecommunications company. The study shows the importance of actors’ individual trajectories and generational memberships for the understanding of collective memory in organizations. Based on the construct narrative habitus, the paper offers, as its primary theoretical contribution, a practice-theoretical framework for the study of mnemonic socialization and cross-generational dynamics of organizational mnemonic communities.