History Retold: Corporate museums as producers of rhetorical narratives

Rhetorical narratives are the selective and persuasive interpretation of organizational history for managers’ strategic purposes. A potential pitfall in rhetorical narratives is a lack of authenticity due to managers excessively bending history to their needs. It has been suggested that material artifacts, as witnesses and representations of historical events, enable and constrain rhetorical narratives, keeping the narratives authentic. To investigate the role of material artifacts in the making of rhetorical narratives, we turned to corporate museums, which have ready access to material artifacts from corporations’ history in their collections. We carried out a multiple case study of six Italian corporate museums, which allowed identifying how corporate museums create authentic rhetorical narratives under the constraints of collection, audience, strategy, taboos, and governance. In our study, we identify corporate museums as active producers of authentic rhetorical narratives in the service of their corporations and its managers, we describe how material artifacts and digitization shape the making and distribution of these narratives, and we show how the narratives are selectively materially grounded in and contextually extrapolated from history.