Corporate history

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Corporate history is the chronological account of a business or other co-operative organization. Usually it is produced in written format but it can also be done in audio or audiovisually.

The genre started to be written by Victorian businessmen, either the founder himself, members of the surviving family owners or long-serving employees. Rather than being sequential histories in the modern manner, many of them were diary-type personal recollections or short, superficial public relations exercises.

Since its pioneering days more than a century ago, the corporate history has developed in fits and starts. Thousands of companies across the industrialised world have put their stories to paper, albeit in their own unique way – from relatively benign, albeit colourful chronicles, usually written for the private archives of founding families, to titles with well-defined corporate applications. The US has been particularly prolific, with the UK always a hesitant patron even though one of its earliest corporate histories, that of a publishing company called the Catnach Press, predates the US’s 1902 Standard Oil biography by 16 years. More histories of British companies were being produced in the last year of the 19th century than were published in the last year of the 20th century.

Between the World Wars, the majority of business histories, and especially in the UK, were house histories, consisting mainly of reminiscences and anecdotes. Only a tiny handful of serious work existed using business records which had found their way into museums, county record offices or the private possession of collectors.

[edit] Academic involvement

Academic involvement probably started in 1924 when Professor George Unwin and co-author George Taylor published a detailed history of ‘Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights: The Industrial Revolution at Stockport and Marple’. It was published by the Manchester University Press. Then, in 1938, the Bank of England commissioned a two-volume 250-year anniversary history. Written by J.H. (later Sir John) Clapham, professor of economic history at Cambridge, it took six years to produce. It was a transparently celebratory vehicle for a famous British institution.

The reason for their existence was usually accidental. The records were often discovered by chance and deemed interesting enough to turn into historical narratives which were funded either by the family descendants of the long-dead businessmen in question or, less frequently, the author in association with a publisher. They had one thing in common - they were generally records of companies that had died or otherwise dropped out of sight.

Nothing happened during the Second World War and several years thereafter but then modern corporate history took its first big conceptual step when, by chance, a hitherto unknown young academic was given the chance of becoming the corporate historian of one of the world's largest manufacturing companies based in the UK. Typically, the opportunity resulted from the personal patronage of a company director who had an casual interest in the value of company history. It was in 1947 that the then chairman of Unilever, Geoffrey Heyworth (later Baron Heyworth), approached G.N. Clark, who had led the national campaign against the destruction of business records, for his advice on writing the history of the Anglo-Dutch manufacturing company. Clark, who had just become a professor of modern history at Oxford, suggested as author a younger colleague, Charles Wilson. The result was a classic, two-volume work that transformed the writing of business history in the UK from a public relations exercise into a reputable branch of scholarship. His authorship of this trail-blazing account of one of western Europe's most important companies confirmed him as the father of modern corporate histories in the UK.

In spite of these and a handful of other large-company models, the majority of books that continue to be written are still PR projects expressly designed to celebrate important anniversaries. A loosely-based percentage estimate would probably expose a 95:5 bias that would probably be not too dissimilar to equivalent projects in the US, Germany and Japan, with the main difference being their utility and the extent of their distribution. Many more corporate histories in the US, for example, are used in the education system.

Today, an increasing number of companies are realising that their corporate histories are effective purveyors of long-term organizational memory and especially suitable for transmitting strategy. As such it can provide an efficient induction/educational tool for transient employees in the highly flexible labor market.

[edit] See also

• Organizational memory (OM)
• Oral debriefing
• Corporate culture
• Corporate memory
• Information age
• Episodic knowledge
• Explicit knowledge
• Tacit knowledge
• Evidence based practice
• Induction
• Mentoring
• Productivity

[edit] Sources

+Arnold Kransdorff, Corporate Amnesia, Butterworth Heineman, 1998. Also [www.corporate-amnesia.com]Arnold Kransdorff, Corporate DNA, Gower Publishing, 2006.