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A Life at the Company: Oral History and Sense Making

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2019

RONALD KROEZE  and
JASMIJN VERVLOET
RONALD KROEZE
Affiliation:
Ronald Kroeze is assistant professor of History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research areas are the history of governance, democracy, and (anti)corruption, as well as business history, management history, and oral history. E-mail: d.b.r.kroeze@vu.nl
JASMIJN VERVLOET
Affiliation:
Jasmijn Vervloet holds a BA in History from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has worked on several projects at the Heineken Collection Foundation and the fourth and fifth May Comity in Amsterdam that focused on oral history. Currently, she is finishing her MA Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. E-mail: jasmijn.vervloet@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article explores the ways that oral history can help business historians to better understand how employees experience and make sense of their life at the company in relation to a company’s identity. The research is based on two case studies. The first concentrates on Heineken. Specifically, it focuses on the closing of the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam in 1988. The second case was a commissioned project to write a book for the eightieth anniversary of the Amsterdam-based consultancy firm Van de Bunt Adviseurs. This project was concluded in 2016 with a publication that, like the research itself, was inspired by a cultural history approach and thus paid attention to founder narratives, sensemaking, and corporate identity construction. The article shows that oral history can broaden knowledge, especially of how employees experienced life at the company and how they made sense of it while referring to the (changing) company’s identity. Through the oral history method, employees were given a voice that showed how the same events were (differently) experienced. Moreover, the oral histories made the personal impact of abstract developments more concrete, notably issues such as internationalization, mergers and acquisitions, changing workings conditions, scaling up or down, or closure. Stories about the founders and the ample use of the family metaphor, which stood out in both cases, expressed employees’ feelings of being part of a company with a specific identity, as well as a longing for it. The article concludes with several suggestions that should be taken into account when conducting oral history research.

Type
Special Section on Oral History
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 33 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. 

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References

Bibliography of Works Cited

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Articles and Chapters in Books

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Archives

Heineken Brouwerijen BV, ZoeterwoudeGoogle Scholar
Heineken Collection Foundation, AmsterdamGoogle Scholar
Van de Bunt, , AmsterdamGoogle Scholar