Imagined Corporate Communities: Historical Sources and Discourses
| Author | Michael Heller,Michael Rowlinson |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12349 |
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 31, 752–768 (2020)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12349
Imagined Corporate Communities:
Historical Sources and Discourses
Michael Heller and Michael Rowlinson1
Brunel University, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, London, UB8 3PH, UK, and 1University of Exeter Business
School, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4PU, UK
Corresponding author email: michael.heller@brunel.ac.uk
Corporations can be conceptualized as imagined communities, in which a sense of com-
munity is created through textualmedia rather than face-to-face communication. Histor-
ically the press, and newspapers in particular,provided texts through which nations could
be imagined as communities. By analogy,historically company magazines can be seen as
texts in which corporations wereimagined as communities of employees. Company mag-
azines were ubiquitous in large corporations by the second half of the twentieth century,
and many continue in print or online. Three enduring discourses of ‘imagined corporate
communities’ are identified from a sample of company magazines from four UK organi-
zations for 1955, 1985 and 2005 – RoyalMail, Cadbury, the BBC and HSBC (formerly
Midland Bank) – as well as periodicals for the professional bodies of magazine editors.
These discourses explain the perceived role of company magazines and can be described
as: ‘esprit de corps’, in which the corporation is imagined as an extended family, pub-
lic school or tightly knit military unit with its own distinctive spirit; ‘brand community’,
where the magazine’s readersare imagined as ambassadors for the brand along with con-
sumers; and ‘democratic polity’, where employees are seen as citizens and the magazine
represents an independent voice holding management to account.
Introduction
The concept of imagined communities starts
from the assumption that ‘all communities larger
than primordial villages of face-to-face contact
(and perhaps even these) are imagined. Com-
munities are to be distinguished, not by their
falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they
are imagined’ (Anderson, 2006, p. 6). By this
definition, if corporations are considered to be
communities, then they must be imagined, but not
This research was supported by a grant from the British
Council/Leverhulme Trust(SG141719).
We would like to thank the BBC, Royal Mail plc, HSBC
Bank plc, Mondelez, the Institute of Internal Commu-
nications, and the John Lewis Partnership for granting
us access to their archives. We are very grateful to their
archivists for help and advice. We would liketo thank all
our interviewees. We are grateful to the three reviewers
who allowed us to develop our ideas through the review
process.
in the style of nations whose citizens are prepared
to go to war (Anderson, 2006, p. 7). The concept
of ‘imagined corporate communities’ opens up
historical questions about when and how the
employees of corporations were imagined as com-
munities with a shared consciousness, and puts
the textual media in which they were imagined,
such as company magazines, at the forefront for
historical research.
The first section of this paper introduces the
historical concept of imagined corporate com-
munities and contrasts it with the management
concept of corporate culture. Imagined com-
munity (Anderson, 2006) is such an important
concept in history and social sciences that its ne-
glect in organization studies requires explanation.
In the second section, the disparate historiography
of company magazines is reviewed from the per-
spective of imagined corporate communities. The
third section then sets out how the discourses of
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Imagined Corporate Communities 753
imagined corporate communities were traced
through triangulation of multiple historical
sources (Kipping, Wadhwani and Bucheli, 2014):
including company magazines from four organi-
zations, as well as periodicals of the professional
bodies of magazine editors, supplemented by six
interviews with magazine editors. The explana-
tion of methods is intended to provide the ‘dual
integrity’ required for historical organizationstud-
ies, meeting the expectations of both historians
and organization studies (Maclean, Harvey and
Clegg, 2016). In the fourth section, three enduring
discourses of imagined corporate communities are
set out: ‘esprit de corps’, in which the corporation
is imagined as an extended family, public school
or tightly knit military unit with its own distinctive
spirit; ‘brand community’, where the magazine’s
readers are imagined as ambassadors for the
brand along with consumers; and ‘democratic
polity’, where employees are seen as citizens and
the magazine represents an independent voice
holding management to account.
In the conclusion, it is argued that although
these three discourses ebb and flow in company
magazines, there isn’t a clear historical progres-
sion – from esprit de corps, through democratic
polity to brand community – that might be ex-
pected from the historiography of company mag-
azines. The enduring historical nature of the three
discourses leads to the expectation that they will
still be found in contemporary internal communi-
cation, including social media used by employees
and consumers.
Imagined corporate communities and
corporate culture
Benedict Anderson’s (2006) book Imagined Com-
munities (first published in 1983) both comes to
terms with nationalism and provides a radical cri-
tique of it. Anderson’s contention is that nations
were imagined as political communities through
periodicals, primarily national newspapers, more
recently than nationalists believe. Other media
have supplanted daily newspapers, from radio and
television to the Internet and social media, but the
point is well made that periodicals and newspapers
were not only crucial in the history of imaginedna-
tional communities but represent valuable sources
for tracing that history. By analogy, it can be sup-
posed that corporations have also been imagined
as communities through periodicals such as com-
pany magazines more recently than is believed in
most corporate cultures.
A reappraisal of Anderson’s (2006) book in
the American Historical Review highlights its clas-
sic status in history, sociology and anthropol-
ogy, as well as English and comparative literature
(Bergholz, 2018, p. 524). As the reappraisal sug-
gests, the book’s influence can be gleaned from
the number of citations to it in Google Scholar,
which stood at 89,566 on 30 July 2018. By com-
parison, there were 56,166 citations to Geertz’s
(1973) Interpretation of Cultures, an influential text
for the culture perspective in organization studies
(Denison, 1996). Anderson is usually cited in man-
agement journals to show howcorporations can be
aected by the discourse of nationalism (e.g. Hell-
gren et al., 2002; Jack and Lorbiecki, 2007; Lubin-
ski, 2018; Vaara and Tienar, 2008, p. 1795). But
organizations themselves are rarely recognized as
‘imagined communities’ in management and orga-
nization studies (Wadhwani et al., 2018, p. 1668).
The possibility of considering corporations as
imagined communities in organization studies
usually relates to the uses of the past and collective
memory in organizations (Suddaby, Foster and
Trank,2010, p. 18; Wadhwani et al., 2018). For the
most part, this research focuses on the uses of the
past in the present, mainly accessed through inter-
views and published secondary sources (Hatchand
Schultz, 2017), with fewer studies of how the past
was used in the past, accessed through primary
historical archival sources (Maclean et al., 2018).
Anteby and Molnar’s (2012) research is notable
because they carried out a content analysis of 309
internal bulletins, akin to company magazines,
from the French aeronautics firm Snecma from
1953 to 1999. Their focus is on Snecma’s selective
representations of the past in its national identity,
but they only mention the concept of imagined
community in passing. However, an imagined
past is only one component of an imagined com-
munity; company magazines constitute historical
evidence that the employees have been imagined
as members of corporate communities, whether or
not there was a historical element in their content.
While the concept of imagined community may
have been overlooked in management and orga-
nization studies, it is seen as a foundation for the
idea of brand community in consumer research
(Muniz and O’guinn, 2001, p. 413). However, the
contemporary imagined communities engendered
C2019 The Authors.British Journal of Management published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British
Academy of Management.
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