Argument by Margarida M. Krohling Kunsch

Corporate memory

Efforts to retrieve their own history are part of business organizations’ public and cultural commitment

What motivates a business organization to invest in projects that retrieve their own history and create memory centers? There are many answers to that question. However, let us focus on some of the principles that should guide these initiatives. Such organizations are both economic and social units. Preserving their memory helps preserve a nation’s culture as well.

A business is an integral part of society that forms part of a system that “imports” different kinds of energy and converts them into goods, products and services, and then “exports” them back to society. They therefore have a socioeconomic connection that goes beyond the business’s functional boundaries.

Accordingly, when a company decides to document its history in the public arena through the retrieval of its memory, it is also spotlighting its cultural commitment. The systemization of its history is a living source of knowledge. It is a saga with a narrative permeated by the subjective outlooks, emotions, crises, tensions, conflicts, achievements and accomplishments experienced by its founders and generations of workers.

All these elements help maintain a unique culture and a strong institutional identity while laying solid foundations for the business’s sustainability.

The memory centers of Brazilian business organizations are proliferating. Organizational Communications and Public Relations have found a fertile field of action on that front, which has come to stay and thrive.

This subject was the focus of a PhD dissertation by Professor Paul Nassar, whom I had the privilege of advising, defended at the University of São Paulo School of Communications and Arts and published in 2007. The richness and scope of the work businesses are doing to preserve their memory are clear in the author’s field research, and the Odebrecht Culture Center has been rated as exemplary in his study.

Margarida M. Krohling Kunsch is the Chair of the Brazilian Association of Organizational Communications and Public Relations Scholars, and a full professor and researcher at the University of São Paulo School of Communications and Arts.