Good war/bad war: a war to remember, a war to forget?

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the distinction that has been developed within organizational studies between collected memory and collective memory to explore and contrast the nature of one multinational company’s organizational memory of World War I and World War II. Although the British American Tobacco Company (BAT) experienced severe upheavals as a result of each of the two global military conflagrations of the twentieth century, this paper argues that in terms of its organizational memory there exist clear distinctions between the two. During the course of World War I, BAT was able for the first time to generate a degree of common identity which served it well in the course of its post war expansion during the 1920s. This emergence of a more unified culture, underpinned by a range of common reference points for its staff based on texts, buildings and monuments, facilitated a company-wide collective memory of the war which was subsequently used to promote an esprit de corps across the organization. During World War II, these common cultural reference points were not developed. Thus an organizational memory of World War II only emerged many decades after the event and took the form of a collected memory based on individual recollections.

KEYWORDS:

• British American Tobacco Company
• World War I
• World War II
• organizational memory
• mnemonic communities

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his gratitude to Suzanne Fisher for general advice and help with the sources used in this paper. My thanks are also due to the editors of the Special Issue, the contributors to the workshop at Henley Business School and two anonymous referees, all of whom gave helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Howard Cox

Howard Cox is Emeritus Professor of International Business History at the University of Worcester.