Organizational Cultures of Remembrance

10  Constructing Identities in Light of the Corporate Past

The workforce shared conceptions of the attributes and qualities possessed by Audi. Recollections of the corporate past played a pivotal role in the processes of constructing and understanding these Audi-related identities – characterizing Audi as a firm, a brand, and a community of people. This chapter investigates these relationships in detail. First, it addresses how the workforce identified profoundly with the contemporary success of the company exactly because they could remember images of an unsuccessful corporate past. Second, I discuss how memories of a substantial brand image transformation, which took place two decades ago, was an important step in the constitution of a collective ...