Explicating corporate heritage, corporate heritage brands and organisational heritage

Recently, considerable academic and management interest has focussed on corporate heritage and, in particular, on the corporate heritage brand notion. This article provides a thorough overview of the field and includes latest developments in the territory including the formal introduction of the organisational heritage concept. Drawing on the extant literature, the article explores five themes relating the broad corporate heritage field: contexts, foundations, fundamentals, advances and empirical insights. This overview also examines key constructs within the domain including corporate heritage brands, corporate heritage identity and organisational heritage. Both theoretical and managerial aspects of the field are addressed. Reference is made to recent empirical contributions and to prominent case study research from Great Britain and China, namely Shepherd Neame (Britain’s oldest brewery with an official founding date of 1698) and Tong Ren Tang (the renowned traditional Chinese medicine corporate brand dating back to 1669)

Introducing organisational heritage: Linking corporate heritage, organisational identity, and organisational memory

In this article we formally introduce and explicate the organisational heritage notion. The authors conclude organisational heritage can be designated in three broad ways as: (1) organisational heritage identity as the perceived and reminisced omni-temporal traits – both formal/normative and utilitarian/societal – of organisational members’ work organisation; (2) organisational heritage identification as organisational members’ identification/self-categorisation vis-à-vis these perceived and reminisced omni-temporal traits of their work organisation, and (3) organisational heritage cultural identification as 0rganisational members’ multi-generational identification/self-categorisation vis-à-vis the perceived and reminisced omni-temporal traits of their work organisation’s corporate culture. To date, advances in heritage studies at the institutional-level have primarily taken place within the broad corporate marketing paradigm. However, we are mindful of developments in the organisational memory field and the need to address and engage with organisational behaviour/management scholarship in the broad organisational identity domain. The realisation that there is a distinct genus of corporate heritage institution (corporate heritage identity) and brand (corporate heritage brand) represents a seismic shift in how scholars theorise about heritage institutions and corporate heritage brands and how the aforementioned are managed. In the development of a field concept introduction and explanation is a key means through which an area can progress and the explicit aim of this article is to achieve the aforementioned by our elucidation of the organisational heritage notion. We argue the literatures on corporate heritage identity, organisational identity, and organisational memory are of assistance in appreciating the saliency of organisational heritage. As such, by building on embryonic scholarship in the corporate heritage this article aims to explicate the nature and significance of organisational heritage. The implications of organisational heritage for corporate heritage brands are also delineated