The Uses of Corporate Heritage: A Critical Approach

ABSTRACT

Corporate enterprises have long embraced their historical legacy, preserving not only documents in their archives, but also buildings, and old equipment from their past operations. Scholars in management and marketing studies have dedicated attention to exploring the heritage of business organizations since the 2000s, primarily interested in how firms leverage their historical legacies to enhance performance, build identity, and ensure long-term success. This has, however, developed independently from the interdisciplinary field of cultural heritage studies, which largely overlooks how corporate enterprises deal with what they see as their own heritage. The paper bridges this divide by reviewing existing heritage approaches in management and marketing studies literature and exploring the potential of addressing this corporate heritage discourse in the field of critical heritage studies. It argues that since socioeconomic interests invariably influence heritage processes, engaging with this corporate heritage discourse may enhance our understanding of the complex interplay between organizations, heritage, and societal dynamics in the broader context of heritage studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate heritage
• uses of the past
• rhetorical history
• organizational memory
• enterprise cultural heritage
• critical approach
• industrial heritage
• organizational identity
• brand management

Introduction

Corporate enterprises, just like other types of organizations, have created and curated their own collections of documents for pragmatic reasons, primarily as legal repositories. They have also taken care of their buildings and equipment inherited from their past. In interdisciplinary cultural heritage studies, which has predominantly embraced a critical approach as its mainstream over the past two decades, corporate enterprises have been discussed as actors leaving behind what is labeled as industrial, environmental, or, more recently, toxic heritage (e.g., High and Lewis 2007; Kryder-Reid and May 2024; Oevermann and Mieg 2015; Wicke, Berger, and Golombek 2018), shaping the urban landscape and heritage sites (Martínez Yáñez 2015), and as representatives of the private sector in heritage management (Starr 2013). Development-lead or commercial archaeology is another area where the relationship between the corporate sector and heritage has been featured (Gould 2017).

However, how firms deal with what they see as their own heritage has rarely been addressed. Since the 2000s, management and marketing studies have dedicated considerable attention to the heritage of business organizations, primarily interested in how organizations use the past to improve their performance and ensure their success. While marketing studies are primarily interested in how firms use heritage in external communication, that is, branding and marketing, management scholars focus more – though not exclusively – on internal communication and heritage as a leadership or management tool (on the difference in approaches, see Brunninge and Fridriksson 2017). Representatives of both fields address how firms utilize their past to construct narratives that align with their present goals and future growth: how they strategically use heritage, for example, to advance economic objectives, create competitive advantage, and foster stakeholder relationships. Both management and marketing studies and the critical direction in the broader interdisciplinary field of cultural heritage studies explore how various actors use the past through narratives created around buildings and institutions such as archives and museums, and traditional practices. The two fields of research have, however, developed independently, with almost no interaction or cross-pollination.

To address this gap, this paper aims to review the prevailing approaches to heritage within management and marketing studies literature, and examine how this field could be addressed by critical heritage studies. The authors argue that critical heritage studies should turn toward this academic discourse because the latter directly influences how corporate actors deal with heritage: how they use it as a resource to produce and strengthen their economic and social power, a heritage process itself that is of interest for critical scholarship in heritage studies.

First, the article identifies the basic concepts and approaches to heritage in the management and marketing studies literature; then, it frames the dominant trends as a corporate heritage discourse, situating it in relation to the discourses prevalent in the critical heritage studies literature. Finally, it points out specific problems with the lack and the potential benefits of addressing the corporate heritage discourse in the context of critical heritage studies.

Our theorizing builds on a semi-systematic literature review focusing on the concept of corporate heritage in management and marketing studies. Though these are two distinct fields with their own agendas, approaches, and terminology, from the perspective of this research, they are both relevant to include in the literature review since they both look at how firms use heritage. Major directions in epistemological approaches across both areas are identified using the typology of organizational theorists Mats Alversson, Stanley Deets, and Kaj Sköldberg (Alvesson and Deetz 2006; Alvesson and Sköldberg 2017), and discourse analysis is used to address the critical perspectives towards heritage to position the corporate heritage discourse in relation to the critical heritage discourse.

Corporate Heritage and Corporate Heritage Discourse

Literature in management and marketing studies includes a segment highly relevant for heritage scholarship because it (1) uses the term “heritage;” (2) incorporates other terminologies that align with the conceptualization of heritage found in critical heritage studies literature; (3) it delves into the customary forms and institutions of cultural heritage management, such as sites, buildings, museums, and archives (Suddaby et al. 2020, 162–163). Examples include research in corporate museums (Ravasi, Rindova, and Stigliani 2019), or the analysis of architecture in the context of organizational memory (Decker 2014).

The concept of “corporate heritage” is relatively new in management and marketing literature, emerging from research on marketing brands, corporate identity (Balmer 2011; Balmer and Burghausen 2015; Balmer, Greyser, and Urde 2006), and organizational longevity (Riviezzo, Garofano, and Napolitano 2021). John Balmer and Mario Burghausen distinguish between corporate heritage and organizational heritage, which focus on corporate brand valorization for external audiences and the use of the past within organizations for identity and culture building, respectively (Balmer and Burghausen 2015; Balmer and Burghausen 2019).

Marketing scholars look at corporate heritage as leverage for an organization's past to gain a competitive advantage in the present and future and how it can contribute to long-term organizational success and survival (Balmer 2011, 1383). The term “heritage” appears in the context of practices, too: History Factory, a US-based enterprise established to help firms turn their past into a resource, uses the term “heritage management” to describe using historical and archival resources and methods to address business competition (Weindruch 2016). In 2010, Satu Aaltonen and co-authors coined the term “enterprise cultural heritage,” referring to a company asset derived from its historical evolution. The authors demonstrate how enterprise heritage capital can be converted into various forms of capital, including financial (Aaltonen et al. 2015).

Management studies literature don’t always use the term “heritage” when they discuss processes that correspond to heritage as defined in critical heritage studies. They address how firms enter into a dialogue with their past, and how they use it for their present purposes and future vision: how the past is produced and becomes “active and alive” in the present via a dialogue between people, objects, places, and practices (Harrison 2013, 32; Waterton, Watson, and Silverman 2017, 8). To label these phenomena, management studies literature created concepts, such as the “uses of the past” or “rhetorical history” (Lubinski 2023; Popp and Fellman 2020). The latter was coined to distinguish the “objective past” from the version created by the firm for its own use. This is done by organizations that consciously cultivate their identity as a vital component of their strategic management (Anteby and Molnar 2012). Connected to memory studies, scholarship on organizational identity has introduced the concept of “organizational memory,” whereby collective memory deploys the past to construct collective identities – a heritage process, even if not labeled as such (Foroughi et al. 2020).

Literature on the use of heritage (Smith 2006) or of the past (Axelsson, Dupont, and Kesteloot 2012) in heritage studies espouses a critical perspective, focusing on the broad societal impact of discourses and processes, and the underlying power structures. This paper explores how the term “uses of the past” relates to this critical approach in what the authors call the “corporate heritage discourse,” based on the example of authorized heritage discourse within the discursive model (Kisić 2016; Smith 2006). This term refers to both the process of business organizations entering into a dialogue with their past and the academic literature discussing these processes. The authors restrict their analysis here to the latter since the analysis of practices would expand the limits of this paper. While such discourse in management studies is not exclusive to businesses, the present paper focuses on the discourse around corporate heritage.

Materials and Methods

To map the context of and the main approaches to heritage in corporate literature, the authors analyze studies on both the concept of “corporate heritage” and on the actual use of organizational heritage, often referred to as “uses of the past” and “rhetorical history.” These key terms were decided upon based on literature reviews on these concepts (Lubinski 2023; Popp and Fellman 2020; Wadhwani et al. 2018) and relevant conferences.

The analysis is based on a semi-systematic literature review aimed at identifying trends in the literature and weighing the impact of these trends by focusing on the most often cited works. To map up alternative, innovative approaches, the authors omitted the latter variable and focused especially on papers published in recent years. The authors searched within the Web of Science Core Collection – Social Sciences Citation Index database by applying four keywords: (((ALL = (“corporate heritage”)) OR ALL = (“uses of the past”)) OR ALL = (“rhetorical history”)) OR ALL = (“enterprise cultural heritage”). Then the authors filtered the results by selecting WOS categories: 6.10 Economics or 6.223 Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism. The result (as of May 29, 2023) revealed 117 records, with the earliest publication in 2009. Relevant literature published before that was identified by applying a snowballing method. More than 50% of publications are in six journals: Journal of Brand Management, Organization Studies, Journal of Business Research, Business History, European Journal of Marketing, and Family Business Review. The five most productive authors are professors in prestigious Western business schools: John Balmer (Brunel University London), Mario Burghausen (Essex Business School), Roy Suddaby (University of Victoria and Washington State University), Diego M. Coraiola (University of Victoria), and Fabien Pecot (Toulouse Business School).

For the analysis, the authors extracted the dominant – though not exclusive – characteristics of what they call corporate heritage discourse. They built it on the selection of the most impactful papers (based on citations) and other relevant theoretical works and empirical studies collected through snowball sampling from the references in the most impactful articles. Content analysis was used to come up with a set of keywords and concepts to identify a critical approach within the examined literature and “cited by” search as well as snowballing to identify contributions that contradict the dominant trend in some respect to add nuances to the characterization of the corporate heritage discourse. The authors employ the “meta-theorizing” approach, an interpretive style of theorizing that questions the categories, biases, and assumptions in the examined literature. This approach involves deep reading and synthesis of existing categories, promoting reflexivity, and suggesting alternative ways of studying and understanding topics (Cornelissen, Höllerer, and Seidl 2021, 7).

Results

In what follows, the authors will present the literature overview along three dimensions. On the axis of explanatory and normative approaches, the research either (1) explains how corporate enterprises work with their past; or (2) helps corporate enterprises to do it better. Both approaches are based on the assumption that the past and the material and immaterial legacy are used and should be used by enterprises to serve their strategic goals. The character and the potential of this resource, however, has evolved from the initial notion of a preexisting entity, through that of a product shaped by a selection process, to something entirely constructed by historians and managers. These phases – comprising the second axis of the present literature review – correspond to the three epistemological approaches in management studies: positivism emphasizing objective data, constructionism exploring the social construction of data, and neorealism seeking to uncover underlying causal mechanisms (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2017).

A third axis concerns the presence or absence of a critical approach. Here, traditional approach will refer to scholars who do not question the right of the firm to use and benefit from its past. At the other end of this axis, researchers look at a broader circle of stakeholders, which leads to questions about the uses of the past as a source of societal power, the structures that enable those holding power to act, and the beneficiaries.

Axis 1. Explanatory and Normative Approaches

Publications gravitating towards the “explanatory” direction theorize how business actors use the past and often build models explaining the different strategies: William Foster et al. developed a typology explaining the strategic use of historical narratives by senior management to build identity, create culture, promote legitimacy, and generate authenticity (Foster et al. 2017); Riviezzo, Garofano, and Napolitano analyzed how heritage is used for marketing purposes by twenty Italian companies, and developed a four-stage heritage marketing strategy model (Riviezzo, Garofano, and Napolitano 2021).

In contrast, those representing a normative perspective, though also theorizing, tend to focus on developing strategies, models, and behavior patterns within an organization. They aim to improve practices and decision-making, turning theory into guidelines for organizational practice. Mario Burghausen and John Balmer combine an explanatory, conceptual approach with a normative one by exploring effective corporate heritage identity management and the role of senior managers in its preservation, offering theoretical insights from the case study of the Shepherd Neame Brewery (Burghausen and Balmer 2014). Normative articles reveal a broad spectrum of applying rhetorical history through websites, museums, job interviews, informal conversations, and hallway photographs (Aeon and Lamertz 2021, 580), as well as material culture such as buildings, equipment, and landscapes (Voronov et al. 2022).

Axis 2. Positivist, Constructionist, and Neorealist Approaches

Management and marketing studies until the 2000s interpreted the past as an objective fact or a contextual variable. Researchers examining corporate strategies along these lines tend to use history to explain retrospectively their success or failure. They consider the past as something beyond the managers’ control; they can only learn about and from it (e.g., Finkelstein 2006; Fridenson 2004).

A constructionist approach to dealing with the organizational past, developed by management scholars in the 2010s, is defined by a distinction between the “objective” past and “subjective” history, referring to David Lowenthal (Lowenthal 1985): the past reflects an objective reality of infinite events, but history reflects a consensual and collective reality created via selection from these (Hamilton and D’Ippolito 2022, 1041; Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010, 152). Researchers observed that organizations can and do construct a history for their own purposes, building on their past selectively or even as a complete fiction. Roy Suddaby et al. coined the term “rhetorical history” as a source of competitive advantage for firms, whereby corporate history, a social and rhetorical construct, is actively built and shaped along the organizations’ own interests to create or destroy legitimacy, construct identity, and facilitate strategic change (Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010). Wadhwani et al. emphasize the performative role of history in making and unmaking organizational orders by making sense of the past, thus, building towards a specific future (Wadhwani et al. 2018).

This neorealist approach – called realist by William Foster et al. – typically includes empirical details backed by extensive archival research, which is essential to have “a convincing and accepted” story (Foster et al. 2017, 1180). The positivist, constructionist, and neorealist approaches are not entirely distinct categories in the literature, as most authors tend to represent a position somewhere along a continuum between the three.

Axis 3. Traditional (Pragmatic) Versus Critical Approaches

Pragmatic approaches towards the past and heritage typically appear in publications using the term “corporate heritage.” Management and marketing scholars look at corporate heritage as leverage to gain competitive advantage without questioning the structures that enable the firms to do so and their broader social consequences (Balmer 2011; Pecot et al. 2018; Robinson and Hsieh 2016). Papers on “heritage marketing” examine powerful interpretations and narratives that help stakeholders identify with firms, highlighting nostalgia (Riviezzo, Garofano, and Napolitano 2021, 11), or uniqueness (Aeon and Lamertz 2021, 578). Elsewhere, corporate heritage is shown to promote legitimacy (Popp and Fellman 2020, 1532), establish an emotional connection with consumers (Miranda and Ruiz-Moreno 2020), and create authenticity (Foster et al. 2017). In managing strategic change, it is used to legitimize novelty (Dalpiaz and Di Stefano 2018) and communicate longevity by the illusion of stability (Aeon and Lamertz 2021, 584).

While most of these publications highlight the strategic advantages of utilizing the past and heritage, some studies have delved into the risks and dangers of doing so – still focusing on the benefits and damages for the firm. For instance, Anders Sørensen and his coauthors examined “Negative Heritage Brand Equity” in the case of COOP, a Danish consumer cooperative, perceived as outdated and limited in its strategic options (Sørensen, Korsager, and Heller 2021). Traditional literature adopting a stakeholder approach concerns practical limitations: managers do not entirely control historical narratives (Lubinski 2018; Popp and Fellman 2020). The historical narrative represented by the firm is just one version of the past and is susceptible to critique (Foster et al. 2017, 1192); other stakeholder groups can create counter-narratives (Aeon and Lamertz 2021), which is a phenomenon companies aim to control (Cappelen and Pedersen 2021).

Researchers adopting a critical approach recognized that corporate heritage is inherently political (e.g., corporate archives as “sites of privilege and power,” Popp and Fellman 2020, 1531, 1532, 1535; and the “politics of the exhibition of organizational memory”, Nissley and Casey 2002, s41, s43). While most papers analyze the actions of senior executives and strategic decision-makers, recent studies have considered how other organizational members and external stakeholders employ history for various purposes (Cappelen and Pedersen 2021; Popp and Fellman 2020; Ravasi, Rindova, and Stigliani 2019).

The ethical issue of whether firms should use the past in their own interests, and the idea that scholars should address this question, was raised by Daniel Wadhwani et al. in the special issue of the Organizational Studies Journal on “Uses of the Past in Organization Studies.” The authors defined three directions for both managers and scholars in terms of the ethics of uses of the past: they should examine whether firms use falsified information, speak up for ethical research even against the interests of firms, and include the narratives of less powerful actors in the organization's history (Wadhwani et al. 2018, 1676–1677). For example, Brad Aeon and Kai Lamertz look at how employees of two unspecified Canadian companies construct counter-narratives to resist dominant managerial rhetorical histories and organizational control (Aeon and Lamertz 2021). Historic Corporate Social Responsibility (Schrempf-Stirling, Palazzo, and Phillips 2016) is another area where the firm’s past is addressed critically due to a clash of views or interests between the corporate actor and a segment of the public. Besides a pragmatic approach focusing on the consequences on the firm of losing its legitimacy, Van Lent and Smith (2020) discuss a perspective they call politico-ethical; they distinguish more and less inclusive ways of gaining legitimacy via historic CSR, where the “social value of corporate-stakeholder interactions” is scrutinized (Van Lent and Smith 2020, 228).

Another group of articles adopted a critical perspective by examining the impact of context on rhetorical history. A case study on a culinary movement in Istanbul showed how organizations strategically craft, employ, and enact historical narratives to construct cultural heritage and incorporate external narratives (Cappelen and Pedersen 2021). Christina Lubinski analyzed three aspects of the context shaping the use of history by German business in colonial India: the existence of multiple audiences, preexisting historical narratives, and social practices giving credibility to historical claims (Lubinski 2018). Anne Mager addressed the use of branding in shaping broader heritage discourses in South Africa, and the significance of liquor for national identity (Mager 2006). These works, however, represent a small segment of the corporate heritage discourse, the majority of which embraces a pragmatic approach, focusing on the benefits of using heritage by those having the power to do it and not questioning the broader societal consequences.

Discussion

The Corporate Heritage Discourse

Along the three axes running from positivist to constructionist, from explanatory to normative, and from traditional to critical approaches, emerges a dominant – though not uniform – discourse that the authors of this paper call corporate heritage discourse. It is dominated by a neorealist perspective distinguishing the objective past and constructed history, following the definitions by David Lowenthal (Lowenthal 1985; Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010). History is presented in this discourse as a result of remembering and forgetting, with references to the field of collective or social memory studies (Halbwachs 1992; Olick 1999). Through this constructed (rhetorical) history, the past is used by the firms as a strategic resource to achieve their goals, which is typically undergirded by references to Hobsbawm and Anderson (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983): organizations are imagined communities that use invented traditions to build their identity (Lubinski 2018; Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010, 161; Wadhwani et al. 2018, 1668). History, traditions, symbols, and artifacts are raw materials for organizational identity building, where organizations incorporate cultural meanings, values, sentiments, and rules associated with these into their identity claims (Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010, 166).

The corporate heritage discourse rarely questions the ownership of the past and the rights of the firms to use it (with the exception of the field of business ethics, see Van Lent and Smith 2020). Researchers analyze and theorize how it is done, and those representing a normative direction explore how it could be done better. Embracing a constructionist perspective, they recognize that there is no single story about the past, and that other stakeholders might create different stories, but the question is how to eliminate this incoherence to serve the firm’s objectives. Scholars only recently started to discuss how stories by other stakeholders might also be used to challenge the power of the firm. Too much fiction or difficult heritage is seen as a problem for the brand (see the literature on historic corporate social responsibility), but ethical issues concerning the broader social impacts of heritage processes are rarely raised.

Heritage in the Corporate and Critical Discourses

The inclusive and social justice-oriented perspective of critical heritage studies, highlighting the role of heritage in socalcioeconomic development and identity building for communities, falls far from the corporate heritage discourse. Both critical heritage discourse and the corporate heritage discourse agree that the past is used (Smith 2006; Smith, Shackel, and Campbell 2011; Winter 2013), offering both exploratory and normative agendas: the difference lies in what it should be used for and by whom, for whose benefit. Corporate heritage studies operate under the assumption that the organization itself is the owner and the primary beneficiary of heritage, and at best, advise how to avoid jeopardizing this benefit. In the corporate context, heritage is a manageable corporate asset, a resource for generating economic advantages, as well as a legitimate management tool (Brunninge 2009).

Heritage as a manageable asset to generate economic benefits appears in a different sense in cultural heritage studies with a particular focus on the heritage industry (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). In this case, the commodification of experience and marketing constitute discourses and processes that are crucial for the emergence of heritage, and define what heritage is in the specific context; the concept of heritage is often interchangeable with culture (Winter 2013, 536; Waterton, Watson, and Silverman 2017, 6). In the corporate heritage discourse, however, the role of heritage is different: it is to support and shape the consumption of other goods or services as well as management processes. It is often – though not always, see e.g., Balmer 2011; Balmer and Chen 2015 – detached from culture; it is associated with history, and history's task is to shape organizational culture. A constructionist view of history/heritage has led to the understanding that it can be used as a device of persuasion that can be manipulated for the purposes of the organization (Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010, 156; quoting History Factory n.d.). Regarding social enterprises that utilize the past in an inclusive and democratic manner, the discourse ranges from exclusive claims of heritage definition by the enterprise to a shared heritage with a broader community (Stutz and Schrempf-Stirling 2020). However, the latter cases are not extensively discussed in the literature on organizational heritage; this is not where the interest lies.

The critical discourse in heritage studies and the corporate heritage discourse share a processual and performative understanding of history/heritage, stemming from a constructionist perspective (Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010, 157–164; Wadhwani et al. 2018). Translated to the terminology of critical heritage studies, history/rhetorical history is interchangeable with heritage. It is, however, closer to definitions where heritage is a constantly evolving construct through which the past becomes alive in the present (Emerick 2014; Waterton, Watson, and Silverman 2017), than the entirely constructionist view of the past produced through heritage (Harrison 2013, 32). Since heritage/history in the corporate heritage discourse is either a management tool or something to manage, the second, fully constructionist approach would raise the same practical problem that became a source of criticism in critical heritage studies. While the idea of an “objective” past that can be flexibly interpreted in the present is an attractive tool in the corporate heritage discourse, a radical constructionism would make heritage management very difficult since it renders fluid what we are supposed to manage (Brumann 2014).

The “Critical” in the Critical and Corporate Heritage Discourses

The positivist approach to corporate heritage asks what heritage is, the normative approach focuses on how heritage can be used, and the constructionist approach on how heritage is produced while used. The latter raises the questions who should be involved in these processes, who controls them, and who is left out. While these questions have defined critical heritage studies for the past two decades, the critical segment of the corporate heritage discourse has avoided challenging the right of the firm to control and manage what is defined as its own heritage; at most, called for an ethical way of doing it (Wadhwani et al. 2018). Although the existence of human actors other than the firm management has been acknowledged, even if as something that leads to further issues to manage, the discourse focuses on what can be done to and via heritage, not on what heritage does besides its intended use and benefit (Waterton, Watson, and Silverman 2017, 3–4).

While in critical heritage studies critical is inherently normative, in the corporate heritage discourse critical and normative are rarely connected: normative scholarship is to support the firm to use the past/history/heritage more efficiently in its own interests. Approaching the corporate heritage discourse from the critical organizational studies perspective, Mats Alvesson and Stanley Deetz suggest that the primary objective of critical theory would be to establish societies and workplaces where “all members have an equal opportunity to contribute to the production of systems that meet human needs and lead to the progressive development of all” (Alvesson and Deetz 2006, 259). This would mean an equal opportunity to contribute to the production of heritage as well, an approach – rarely present in the corporate heritage discourse – which would, again, challenge the exclusive ownership of heritage by the firm.

A Comparative Heritage Discourse Analysis

Since the function of the corporate heritage discourse is to produce heritage that supports the underlying power systems, the question arises whether corporate heritage discourse is an authorized heritage discourse (AHD) as coined by Laurajane Smith: a self-referential discourse that relies on specific grand narratives and the knowledge-based power of experts, and institutionalized by the relevant apparatus of the state (Smith 2006, 11). At a closer look, the corporate heritage discourse resembles the AHD in some respects, while in others, it is closer to what Višnja Kisić termed as “inclusive heritage discourse” (Kisić 2016, 70–76). Kisić defined the latter as the discourse challenging the understanding of heritage as articulated in the AHD and representing a new ethics that emerged through critical heritage scholarship, practice, and key policy documents, particularly the UNESCO Declaration on Protection of Cultural Diversity (2001), the UNESCO Declaration on Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), and the Faro Convention (2005).

Adding the corporate heritage discourse to Kisić's comparison of AHD and inclusive heritage discourse (Kisić 2016, 73, Table 71) reveals the characteristics that are similar to and distinctive from both (Table 1). The understanding of heritage in the corporate heritage discourse is different from the AHD in that it is dynamic (processual, performative) and based on a constructionist perspective. Unlike the AHD, corporate heritage discourse does not center on the role of the material and its conservation but more on the meanings and values seen as extrinsic and instrumental (Smith 2006; Smith, Shackel, and Campbell 2011). However, in the corporate heritage discourse, it is the experts who define what these values are. Like the AHD, it typically does not encourage the participation of a broader range of stakeholders. Though corporations hire corporate historians who work with the lawyers and marketing departments of the firm (Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010, 163, 168), this is not a heritage-expert led discourse. The role of experts is to legitimize power by contributing to heritage production with professional tools and according to professional standards. In this respect, a common element between AHD and the corporate heritage discourse is that both work to underpin and validate narratives that are put to use by certain groups for certain purposes (Smith 2006, 191–192).

Table 1. Authorized, inclusive, and corporate heritage discourses.

	Authorized heritage discourse	Inclusive heritage discourse	Corporate heritage discourse
Understanding of heritage	Static witness of the past	Dynamic, (re)constructed in the present, evolving	Dynamic, (re)constructed in the present, evolving
Scope	Material remains	Intangibility which can be materialized	Intangibility which can be materialized
Value	Intrinsic, embedded in heritage	Extrinsic, instrumental	Extrinsic, instrumental
Key concepts	Universality, excellence, professionalism, authenticity, monumentality	Participation, diversity, human rights, intercultural dialogue	Organizational identity, branding, authenticity
Authority/actors	Governments, public memory institutions, experts	Governance as assemblages of diverse stakeholders	Managers, experts
Level	Inter(national)	Communal, subaltern, regional, local, individual, inter(national)	Institutional, interwoven with national, regional, local
Policy approach	Top-down, democratization of culture	Bottom up, cultural democracy and cultural utilitarianism	Top-down, utilitarianism
Attitude towards dissonance	Ignoring, marginalization, neutralization	Appraisal, negotiation, dialogue, reconciliation	Elimination

All these have implications for how dissonance is understood and dealt with. While critical heritage scholars define heritage as something that is dissonant by its nature (Daly and Chan 2015; Harrison 2013, 140–166; Kisić 2016; Smith 2006, 82; Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996), aversion towards dissonance is a common element in the corporate heritage discourse and AHD, which tends to be integrationist, producing one dominant narrative, and focusing on the consensual and comfortable (Smith, Shackel, and Campbell 2011). Organizations use heritage to promote certain socio-cultural values associated with their products and services, so the stories they choose are centered on their own values, “synthesized” for “organizational sensemaking” (Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010, 164). In this top-down relationship, the role of the public is to consume these stories and accommodate the values that are promoted through them, with a limited opportunity to engage with heritage processes.

Both in critical heritage studies and in the corporate heritage discourse, heritage is understood as both a cultural tool used in individual and collective remembering and commemoration, and a “performance involved in ‘working out’ and asserting identity and sense of place and the various cultural, social and political values,” (Smith, Shackel, and Campbell 2011, 4), but the conclusions are different. In critical heritage studies this definition opens towards subaltern groups and discourses, while in corporate heritage discourse, it enables the targeted use of heritage.

The Uses of Corporate Heritage

The right of the public to culture and cultural heritage, to participate in decisions about these – in terms of equal human rights – has been a central issue in international heritage policy discourse and in the academic literature of critical heritage studies. This is usually addressed in terms of national or global heritage (Harrison 2013, 140–166; Waterton, Watson, and Silverman 2017, 8). The corporate heritage discourse puts the past/history/heritage of the firm in focus, but since conferring the legitimacy of the firm is one of its main functions, businesses build on broader categories – most frequently on national heritage – as a source of legitimization (Lubinski 2018; see also case studies of culinary heritage in Cappelen and Pedersen 2021; Narvselius 2015; Pirani 2022).

Corporations also often use the international heritage discourse on sustainable development for their own purposes, applying sustainability as a buzzword in branding and heritage as a source of legitimacy in this respect. In the same way, corporate social responsibility presented as a part of heritage represents a community-centered, socially sustainable approach useful for building the brand (Coombe and Baird 2015; Starr 2013). Corporate heritage as an academic discourse actively and directly supports these processes. The most cited authors teach in prominent business schools, where future corporate leaders are educated in how to use heritage more efficiently. For senior executives, the ideas are communicated via influential journals such as the Harvard Business Review in papers with self-explanatory titles: “If You Don’t Like Your Future, Rewrite Your Past” (Kanter 2012) or “How Companies Escape the Traps of the Past” (Govindarajan and Faber 2016). Executives wishing to turn heritage into a resource for competitive advantage can turn to consultancies such as The Centre for Business History (naringslivshistoria.se), the Winthrop Group (winthropgroup.com), or The History Factory (historyfactory.com), specializing in “extracting value from the company's history” (Weindruch 2016). They handle corporate anniversaries and milestones, offer exhibits and experiences, publications, archival services, websites, and storytelling, and manage communications.

Why is all this a problem and why is the heritage of the business not only the business of the business? Corporate enterprises do not exist in isolation, neither in the present societies nor concerning their past and heritage. Their stories are integral parts of social memory and social identities, and addressing the corporate heritage discourse leads to the basic question of who decides what society remembers and forgets and, ultimately, who we are in the present and who we want to be (Waterton, Watson, and Silverman 2017, 10). As demonstrated above, corporate heritage discourse is both similar to and distinct from the AHD, so it should be addressed critically just as the AHD, but with a focus on those mechanisms and heritage processes that are specific to this discourse and the actors defining it.

Conclusions

This paper argues that critical heritage studies and management and marketing studies should enter into a conversation over what heritage is and how it is / should be used and addresses the potential benefits of such a dialog. Critical heritage studies should turn toward the heritage discourse characteristic of the corporate environment and manifest in the related academic literature because this discourse has consequences that fall into the focus of its interest: through academic and grey literature, higher education, and consultancy, the corporate heritage discourse has a direct influence on how heritage is used by corporate actors.

Heritage is a socioeconomic resource for companies, a source of power, so producing corporate heritage is a sociopolitical process reflecting and confirming corporate power structures. Since critical heritage studies put such processes in their focus, a dialogue with the field of corporate heritage would reveal how its actors shape the public perception of the value of various cultural expressions at a broader societal level. The corporate heritage discourse, interwoven with international, national, regional, and local heritage discourses, is highly relevant for the large and complex challenges we face today, such as economic inequalities, conflict resolution, social cohesion, accelerated urbanization, and environmental sustainability (Coombe and Baird 2015). If critical heritage studies aim to understand how heritage has a stake in all these, the relevance of corporate heritage processes should also be tackled.

This paper aims to draw the attention of critical heritage studies scholars to the corporate heritage discourse in management and marketing studies. What corporate heritage scholars can learn from critical heritage studies would require another study, presumably in a management or organizational studies journal. However, since discourses in critical heritage studies and the field of corporate heritage are based on fundamentally differing belief systems regarding who should benefit from heritage, any contribution made by critical heritage studies to the corporate discourse would imply an explanatory perspective. A normative approach with a critical heritage lens would either destroy the corporate heritage discourse or be used in its bits and pieces as a tool to work towards an aim that is essentially unacceptable for a heritage scholar adhering to a critical perspective. Engagement with the critical heritage studies literature might inspire management scholars applying an explanatory approach to ask questions about how and what kind of heritage is used by corporate actors to create and solidify their economic and social power; what other actors engage with heritage to claim power, and how successfully; who is included to and excluded from heritage processes by whom, and what the broader social consequences of inclusion and exclusion are. In terms of practices, the critical heritage perspective would likely be more applicable to responsible and ethical businesses that take inclusivity seriously.

The stakeholder approach prevalent in management studies has appeared in the corporate heritage literature too, addressing how organizational and external stakeholders employ history for various purposes, but not necessarily from a critical perspective. Researchers adopting a critical approach recognized that corporate heritage is inherently political and tied to structures of privilege and power. The literature segment that has the most potential for critical heritage scholars in terms of finding an intersection is in the field of business ethics and is itself critical of the mainstream of the corporate heritage discourse addressing how firms misuse the past or appropriate the heritage of various communities from a position of power (see Van Lent and Smith 2020; Wadhwani et al. 2018). While these scholars are interested in the consequences of such ethically problematic corporate behavior of the firm in terms of its legitimacy, critical heritage studies have the potential to address how such acts impact other stakeholders and communities.

The autors conclude this overview by identifying some areas in critical heritage studies where an engagement with the corporate heritage discourse and corporate heritage in general might bring new insights. In the corporate heritage discourse, heritage is used to create continuity amid change and uncertainty, as a tool in managing change, a source of agency. This potential in heritage is recognized in critical heritage studies as well, with increasing attention paid to the role played by heritage in managing our relationship with the future (Harrison et al. 2020; Holtorf and Høgberg 2015). Since “future perfect thinking” – understanding how one wants to be remembered and making decisions today that are consistent with those future images (Gioia, Corley, and Fabbri 2002) – is a recognized approach in organizational management, engaging with this discourse might be another fruitful direction for heritage futures scholars.

Cultural economy offers another mode to think about heritage. All heritage management has economic implications, and heritage institutions are public or private enterprises too (Starr 2013). How heritage is used for branding and identity building when selling heritage itself should be addressed more explicitly to understand the underlying social processes and unintended consequences. Engaging with the corporate heritage discourse, where these practices are analyzed with the help of an elaborate theoretical apparatus, can be a useful learning exercise.

Finally, a promising field to address from a critical perspective is the influence of academic corporate heritage discourse on heritage practices specific to corporations and, in turn, reinforcing the corporate heritage discourse by these practices. Among the many questions this dynamic raises, how corporate heritage can be an integral part of the broader heritage landscape seems especially poignant. Further afield, the related question of how it can contribute to sustainable urban and rural development leads to the field of industrial heritage management, a concept generally framed within the authorized heritage discourse.

Due to the overlaps and discrepancies in aims, vocabulary, and approaches outlined above, the reconsideration of the corporate heritage discourse from a critical perspective opens up a range of new challenges for scholarship. If what is understood as industrial heritage in the heritage expert discourse is managed by corporations, what are the implications in terms of how the past is used? How does this industrial-corporate heritage intersect with regional and national heritage? How does it support and use an integrationist authorized heritage discourse? Especially relevant for deindustrialized regions where heritage is key for finding new identities, but corporate actors are often invisible in the heritage discourse, the latter questions are food for thought for a broadening community of researchers, practitioners, and corporate decision-makers.

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Zsuzsanna Reed for her invaluable help in finalizing this paper. They are also thankful to the reviewers for their constructive suggestions and comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).