Charlotte Linde’s exploration of narrative and institutional memory is also an exploration of the work and worlds of a corporate ethnographer who is currently employed as a Senior Research Scientist in the Work Systems Design and Analysis Group at NASA Ames Research Center. Though the book at first appears to be focused on Linde’s three-year ethnographic study of a major American insurance company, which she conducted as part of a team from the Institute for Research on Learning, Linde draws on a large cache of corporate ethnographic studies throughout the text. As such, this book is of particular value to those interested in the social scientific study of contemporary corporations and may serve to introduce that readership to the narrated aspects of collective – and specifically corporate – identity and memory. Indeed, in Working the past, Linde builds on her previous work on individual life stories (Life stories: The creation of coherence, Oxford University Press 1999), by looking at the “life story of groups” and asking “what is it, how is it told, who tells it, and what is it used for” (p. 5).
Working the past is divided into ten chapters. In the introductory chapter, entitled “How institutions remember,” Linde establishes the inviting and reflective tone she maintains throughout the text, writing “I want to tell you a story about how institutions work their pasts: specifically how institutions and their members use narrative to remember” (3). She warns the reticent reader that her protagonist is an insurance company, a place where stories are stocked and workers look for occasions to tell them and thus strengthen the bonds of institutional membership.
Chapter 2 is straightforwardly titled “Data for the study: The MidWest Insurance Company.” A reader not already fascinated with the insurance industry may approach this chapter with some trepidation. However, Linde succeeds in demonstrating just what is fruitful about this site for an exploration of narrative and institutional memory. Here, we are introduced to the intriguing ethical and practical quagmires involved in selling life insurance and the agents who work to resolve them. Chapter 2 also includes an excellent parallel discussion of the ethics involved in conducting corporate ethnography, with particular attention to the issues that arise when one is being paid by the institution one studies and is asked by management to study the practices of line workers.
Chapter 3 is entitled “Occasions for institutional remembering.” Here, Linde suggests that institutions remember by relying on individual members’ ability to transmit stories about the institutional past and thereby transform banal work sites and events into occasions for institutional remembering. In this chapter, Linde also notes that institutions remember by inscribing the past on physical infrastructure and material artifacts, including logoed letterhead, key chains, and commemorative plaques that line the walls of corporate headquarters. This was one of the many junctures of the book at which I wanted a richer ethnographic description, in large part because Linde succeeded in the previous two chapters in interesting me in MidWest as a fertile site to explore institutional remembering. Rather than drawing on others’ work to illustrate the “artifacts used for remembering,” I would have liked to hear more about what institutional artifacts MidWest agents have on their desks, for instance, to remind themselves or others about their own or their institution’s identity. Similarly, though I learned of many other interesting studies in the section of the chapter intriguingly called “Places as occasions for remembering,” I still had very little sense of the physical layout of Linde’s field site, or as she calls it, her “protagonist.” However, Linde’s main point is well taken: Institutional memory is not just about storage and stocking, but also involves transmission of signs of an incorporated past – whether exchanged in the form of verbal anecdotes or embossed letterhead.
Just as the reader sometimes is left wanting more detail about the everyday practices at MidWest, Linde’s notion of exactly what constitutes an “institutional narrative” could use more elaboration early in the book. Up to chapter 4, I was unsure just what kind of linguistic forms and practices constituted or counted as a narrative for Linde. Yet, in “Retold tales: Repeated narratives as a resource for institutional remembering,” we learn that Linde is particularly interested in that which is repeatable, as “retold narratives … form an important part of the way that institutions remember their past and use that remembering to create current identities for both the institution and its members” (73). For Linde, it also appears that narrative is essentially a cohesive force, not only bringing the past into the present but also uniting narrator and audience members, who may themselves become retellers. Indeed, though there is brief mention of stratified “story-telling rights” (78) and an acknowledgment of the subtle politics of evidentiality both here and in chapter 6, we learn very little of any conflicts or power struggles that one imagines are part and parcel of institutional narrating and remembering.
This continues to be the case in the following chapter, which promises by its title to tell “Multiple versions of MidWest’s history.” This is essentially a chapter about stance, and more particularly, about how people align themselves with what Linde calls the “core institutional memory,” which she defines as “an account of the most salient events and evaluations of the institution’s past” (90). Here, Linde focuses on five “temporally complete tellings” (122) of Midwest’s history: a company-commissioned “official history,” a memoir of the company founder, company newsletter articles, a headquarters trainer’s speech, and an interview with a district manager. Chapter 6 is similarly interested in the Rashomon-like qualities of institutional narration, underscoring that “stories are occasioned, move from one modality to another, and from one point of view to another” (140). Still, the reader is given very little information about the institutional effects of these narrative transactions.
Chapter 7, which addresses “paradigmatic narratives,” or “narratives that collectively constitute the model for a career” (142), is a rather fascinating reflection on the applied side of corporate ethnography. From the many stories about career expectations and trajectories that Linde and her colleagues gleaned from MidWest agents and managers, they created a narrative amalgam called the “The Story of Bob” – a story of an “ordinarily competent” rather than “unusual or heroic” member of the institution. Notably, the “Story of Bob” was a tool for sharing findings with the agents and managers at MidWest, who had differing expectations about the importance and desirability of selling life insurance. Here, it becomes clear that as an applied linguist and ethnographer, Linde’s role at MidWest was to tell life stories rather than simply document them, and to help create the corporate coherence she set out to study.
The next two chapters address how stories travel and how stories are silenced, respectively. In chapter 8, we learn how new members are inducted into the institution through narrative means, and what roles citation, quotation, evaluation, and critique play in socialization practices. Linde is also interested here in the relationship between personal narratives and institutional ones, suggesting that “one’s story is not only one’s own” (195), an insight that is quite familiar to the readers of this journal. In chapter 9, “Noisy silences,” Linde returns to methodological questions – the book’s strength, in my estimation. Specifically, she asks how one studies silence in institutions, and suggests that “finding a silence is necessarily a work of comparison” (197) between various accounts and entails connecting those accounts with the situations in which they unfold. This methodological reflection is followed by a very brief conclusion that summarizes the main points of the preceding text.
Considering Linde’s ongoing engagement with an impressive range of social scientific work on institutional practice, I was very surprised that she at no point engaged Mary Douglas’s classic How institutions think (Reference Douglas1987). Indeed, Douglas devotes herself to similar questions, with chapters on how “Institutions confer identity,” and how “Institutions remember and forget.” And while Douglas is more interested in analogy than in narrative, her meditations on whether institutions have minds and can think, or whether institutions (rather than individuals) decide or classify, make her an especially appropriate interlocutor.
Taking on precisely the social scientific questions that fascinated thinkers like Douglas – such as “How do social structures reproduce themselves?”(9) – Linde offers responses that clearly have the contemporary American corporation in mind. While students of language and narrative may already be familiar with the book’s lessons on memory and identity, it will be of value to those interested in how to study the narrative practices of corporations, and the methodological issues and research ethics specific to corporate ethnography.
