Use-of-the-past research has advanced our understanding of how top managers instrumentalize past knowledge, events and rhetorical constructions to advance their present-day interests. However, it is ...unclear how they use the past when they have divergent understandings of the past and different visions of the future. Temporal tensions can lead to a period of unsettlement in organizations, undermine the top management’s power base, and open up space for middle managers to take a central role in using the past. Through a longitudinal case study of a Japanese craft firm with a history of over 200 years, we examine how middle managers progressively take an active role in using the past through three processes: temporal mobility, temporal socialization and coalescing the past. Our findings challenge the somewhat linear conception of time in the use-of-the-past literature by elucidating the emergent, in-the-moment evolution of middle managers’ strategic use of the past. By adopting a process-analytic lens, our findings extend current understanding of the strategic use of the past as not undertaken by a few powerful individuals in a given moment, but a continually changing process enacted by multiple middle managers with different temporal orientations. Moreover, our findings contribute to the use-of-the-past literature by taking a relational perspective of temporality. Finally, we reconceptualize the strategic flexibility of middle managers from a temporality perspective, showing that they can alter the temporal orientations of those at the top and the bottom.
Presentamos los resultados de un estudio sobre cómo se trata la Transición en los manuales de Historia de España utilizados en 2.º de Bachillerato durante la etapa de LOMCE, entre 2013 y 2022. ...Adoptamos el marco de las investigaciones que se centran en el análisis del contenido y la forma del discurso histórico en los libros de texto, dentro del ámbito de los propósitos señalados por Jörn Rüsen: saber con qué demora llega a los libros de texto el debate académico, conocer qué aplicación se hace del conocimiento histórico y, finalmente, descifrar qué mensajes transmiten en el campo de la formación política.1 Nuestro objetivo es demostrar que los libros de texto abordan la Transición con un enfoque institucional que potencia su carácter consensuado y minimiza la dimensión del conflicto social y el papel de los agentes sociales. Así, los textos no proporcionan al alumnado un adecuado conocimiento de la compleja génesis del actual régimen parlamentario; pero tampoco transmiten la idea de que una democracia es el resultado de la dialéctica entre los actores sociales en presencia. Por tanto, sería necesario desarrollar y facilitar las herramientas críticas, desde el campo de la Historia, que les permitieran actuar como ciudadanos de un sistema político participativo.
West-Germany, then reunified Germany, accepted the judicial and moral heritage of the 3rd Reich; as such its identity built up on the memory of Nazi crimes, particularly the holocaust. The Germans ...themselves paid a heavy toll to the war of aggression, the flight and the expulsion of 14 millions of people, from Central and South-East Europe constitute one of the deadly consequences of this war. Through several successful German movies (from 1951 to 2015), we will study the memorial mutations of the flight and the expulsion on the screen – which are sometimes concurrent with those of the war and of the holocaust. Cinema, “agent of history” (Marc Ferro), indeed plays a major role as a witness or possibly even as an actor of these memorial evolutions, which are sometimes spectacular in a country characterised by a definitely unique history.
The author of the article notes that the political use of the past is important for the construction of all types of collective identity. However, the past and the historical memory have special ...significance for the “imagined nations”. In point of fact, the historical narratives of national unity fulfill an integrative function, that reduces the level of existing differences. Consequently, this function is allowed the members of the nation to comprehend themselves as belonging to the “collective identity”. Hereby, political elites play a special role in the process of the national identity formation, as they have access to the most influential forms of public discourse, such as mass media, politics, science, education and state bureaucracy. And this means that they have “access to the consciousness” of the masses.
Desde las aportaciones metodológicas y teóricas de los memory studies, este artículo analiza la configuración de la memoria de Blas de Lezo desde sus inicios hasta finales del siglo XIX. A partir del ...estudio de biografías, compendios históricos y artículos periodísticos principalmente, tratan de delimitarse los factores que confluyen en su construcción, la versatilidad de su funcionalidad política y las constantes modificaciones producidas en sus usos públicos. La revalorización de la figura de Lezo es interpretada como símbolo del imperio y la nación española, esencia de la españolidad –unida a la exaltación de los fueros y la especificidad vasca– y ejemplo de sacrificio para una marina liberal en horas bajas. De la dispersión de su recuerdo en el siglo XVIII se pasa a una narrativa más cohesionada, cuyo punto álgido deviene en 1870, de la mano de los foralistas vascos y los militares españoles. Se argumenta que a finales de siglo, tras las pugnas por establecer un relato verídico de lo acontecido en Cartagena de Indias, la versión militar del personaje triunfa, imponiéndose con la guerra hispano-estadounidense de 1898 como símbolo de la resistencia frente al enemigo.
In Modern Scottish history, few events have had as much resonance and emotional charge as the Highland Clearances, i.e. the evictions of tenants and the social conflicts in northern Scotland and the ...Hebrides from the middle of the 18th century until 1886, when legislation put an end to large-scale removals by conferring security of tenure on crofters and considerably restricting landowning power. The Highland Clearances still retain much of their mobilizing power. The adjectives “contested” or “controversial” are recurrently applied to the events and their re-presentations, be they literary or historical. This article uses the notion of “cultural memory”, put forward by Jan Assman, to analyse the meaning, values and mind-set that the collective memory of the Clearances has come to encapsulate. It surveys the historiography of the Clearances, the literary production of the period and the political appropriation of the events, and brings to light the consistency and stability of the cultural memory of those events. As a result, the Clearances have become a potent symbol in Scottish political discourse, hijacked by Nationalist and Labour politicians alike to feed arguments in favour of the reform of land ownership and land access, in short the democratization of the land system.
More than with facts, history is concerned with their representation. This statement takes a particular meaning in the context of contemporary Russia, where the issue of the political use of the past ...is tightly connected with the construction of national identity. In order to analyse how the contemporary Russian authorities reassess Soviet history, I focus on school textbooks. Indeed, textbooks largely shape the self and the other, and are a major vector of socialisation. The analysis of recently published school textbooks on the soviet period highlights three dominating tendencies of the actual history narrative : the attenuation of the "dark pages" of Soviet history, the reconstruction of historical continuity and the presence of a strong patriotic dimension. These three elements seem to set the basis of a new Russian national identity.
Telling Children About the Past Nena Galanidou, Liv Helga Dommasnes / Nena Galanidou, Liv Helga Dommasnes
12/2007, Volume:
6
eBook
This book brings together archeologists, historians, psychologists, and educators from different countries and academic traditions to address the many ways that we tell children about the (distant) ...past. Knowing the past is fundamentally important for human societies, as well as for individual development. The authors expose many unquestioned assumptions and preformed images in narratives of the past that are routinely presented to children. The contributors both examine the ways in which children come to grips with the past and critically assess the many ways in which contemporary societies and an increasing number of commercial agents construct and use the past.
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