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On-line Papers / Journal Articles
Paul Gough
Corporations and commemoration –
First World War remembrance, Lloyds TSB and the National Memorial
Arboretum
International Journal of Heritage Studies,
Winter, 2004
Abstract
This paper explores the role of corporations
and financial organizations in maintaining a memory of employees
who have served during the wars of the twentieth century. Focusing
initially on memorial schemes devised by finance houses in the commemorative
era after the Great War, the author examines the emergence of a
broader approach to organizational memory and the social construction
of collective memory.
Taking the Lloyds TSB finance group as a case study, the author
examines the origins of the company’s war memorial in central
London, and the recent attempts to re-locate a number of memorial
objects and icons accumulated during the expansion of the group.
This case study indicates how the social memory of an organization
might be understood through an appraisal of the monumental furniture
that lives, often invisibly, within an organization.
The paper concludes with a number of questions concerning the nature
of organizational memory when confronted with a history of merger
and acquisition, and the difficulties of finding a commemorative
site able to represent and safeguard these histories.
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