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Research Summary The capacity to manage history is an important but undertheorized component of dynamic capabilities. We argue that the capacity to manage the interpretation of the past, in the present for the future, is a critical ability that informs a firm's ability to successfully enact changes needed to adapt to disruptive technology. We identify and elaborate three specific cognitive interpretations of history—history as objective fact, history as interpretive rhetoric, and history as imaginative future‐perfect thinking—and demonstrate how these different views of history can be mobilized by managers to sense, seize, and reconfigure around opportunities made available by understanding the invisible thread of technology. Managerial Summary History is typically understood to be a constraint on a manager's ability to effect change. A firm's past is assumed to create inertia in routines and structures that compromise a firm's ability to change. We show how acquiring a broader understanding of the role of history can improve a manager's ability to enact organizational change. Studying the evolution of technology over time and across products allows managers to sense opportunities created by technological change. Using different narrations of the past as continuous or disruptive can improve a manager's ability to motivate or resist change. Using the past to construct convincing scenarios of the future, managers can enroll key stakeholders in the industry to support a strategic direction that advances the firm's strategic goals.

Research Summary Imprinting theory predicts that organizations are imprinted with multiple intersecting imprints that persist. Evidence suggests, however, that imprints are sometimes reprioritized or modified, implying that they can be strategically managed. We draw upon rhetorical history research and an in‐depth historical case study of New Zealand's Gallagher Group to describe how one firm managed its imprints. Our inductive theorizing links historically imprinted strategic guideposts to decision‐making via two rearranging processes—that is, prioritizing and suspending—wherein managers use narratives to rearrange guideposts' influence and two scope modifying processes—that is, constraining and expanding—wherein managers change where guideposts apply. As a first explanation of how imprints are managed, these processes add nuance to existing theory and open new research avenues regarding additional processes and boundary conditions. Managerial Summary Imprints are elements of culture, strategy, structure, or decision‐making that emerge when the firm is founded or during times of turmoil. Imprints resist change and make organizational adaptation difficult. This study explains one way that managers manipulate imprinted decision‐making rules so that organizations can adapt. Using an in‐depth historical case study of New Zealand's Gallagher Group from 1938 to 2015, we follow four imprinted decision‐making rules that we call strategic guideposts and show how managers rhetorically revised these rules to adapt organizational decision‐making to changing environments. Managers prioritized some decision‐making rules while deemphasizing others or they changed their claims about the kinds of decisions where a decision‐rule applied. Knowing these rhetorical processes can help managers leverage their organization's history to facilitate necessary organizational change.

Purpose This study aims to use a theoretical-based case study of two distinct ownership groups of the Jack Daniel’s brand to explore how rhetorical history (i.e. malleability of the past for strategic goals) may evoke and capitalize on different forms of nostalgia. Within, the authors configure four forms of nostalgia (i.e. personal, historical, collective and cultural) from the individual or collective interaction and level of direct experience one has with the past as lived or happened. Design/methodology/approach This study uses an historical research approach which involved the identification of primary and secondary sources, facility tour, source criticism and triangulation to create themes of rhetorical history infused with nostalgic narratives using compelling evidence through rich description of this fusion. Findings The findings reveal how nostalgia-driven narratives reflecting different collective longing for the re-creation of an American Paradise Lost used by Jack Daniel (i.e. the man) and later but differently by Brown-Forman. This study uncovers how the company’s inherited past was used rhetorically throughout its history, beginning with the nostalgic story of Jack Daniel and the distillery’s nostalgically choreographed location in Lynchburg, Tennessee. This study delves into this setting to highlight the importance of symbols, details, emotional appeals and communications for collective memory and identity development and to showcase the ways in which they are influenced by different types and forms of nostalgia. Originality/value This study adds to a limited number of studies focused on understanding the impact of founders on an organization’s brand and how that is malleable. This study responds to scholarly calls to study the influence of sequenced historical rhetoric on an organization and highlight the relevance of social emotions such as nostalgia for rhetorical history. Finally, the theoretical contribution involves the advancing and construction of a theory typology of nostalgia previously proposed by Havlena and Holak in 1996.

This essay investigates the contemporary association between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and delinquent behavior. Long before its diagnostic appearance as ADD in the DSM III (1980), youth behavior associated with hyperactivity and impulsivity was rhetorically situated within an ecology of delinquency science which yoked these behaviors to criminality. Because rhetorics of criminality are profoundly racialized in the U.S., a close study of ADHD and delinquency must contend with the ways racial discourses have determined conceptualizations of juvenile behavior, particularly in educational contexts.  Through an analysis of two rhetorical case studies, I demonstrate how hyperactivity and restlessness were initially associated with delinquency by proponents of the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s. The same behaviors were later imbued with sinister and antisocial meanings by a white public responding to school desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Seen from this perspective, the contemporary rhetoric of ADHD can be understood as a type of delinquency rhetoric from its inception. 

Purpose This study aims to illustrate how firms engage in rhetorical history, i.e. “the process by which managers skillfully impose meaning on a firm’s past as a persuasive and agentic process” (Suddaby et al., 2010). The case study shows that the connection of past events to specific and schematic narratives allows external events to be appropriated and used by Starbucks as assets to achieve its organizational goals (e.g. legitimacy). Design/methodology/approach The study is based on a close reading and coding of 1,852 “stories” (2,470 pages) published by Starbucks between 2003 and 2020. Findings The authors first show that Starbucks’ language relies heavily on terms referring to temporality. The authors then highlight the organization’s efforts to assert its history, to emphasize its heritage and to inscribe itself in local and national histories. With this case study, the authors contribute to the ongoing debate on history as an organizational resource. The study shows how brands that are not necessarily “historical” can mobilize rhetorical history in their strategic marketing. Research limitations/implications This case study illustrates four heritage implementation strategies: narrating, visualizing, performing and embodying. Further research could contribute to the discussion of rhetorical history production practices, in particular how heritage elements are validated, articulated, related and adopted by organizations (Burghausen and Balmer, 2014). Originality/value The research shows that the main mechanism for constituting social memory assets does not lie in the accumulation of narratives, but in the coupling of narratives at different levels, and in the inclusion of several stakeholders within the narratives. The research also highlights that the affirmation of the historicity of the firm is a prerequisite for the constitution of social memory assets. The research shows that there are a wide variety of ways to convey historical narratives, in particular the essential role leadership plays in the rhetorical process of historicization. The research also shows that the issues of identity and legitimacy are more closely linked than previous research has suggested. In a way, rhetorical history serves strategic management as much as marketing. The porosity between the different audiences allows for a strong alignment between stakeholders, thus consolidating a competitive advantage that lies at the heart of Starbucks’ success, and which notably contributes to reinforcing its core value proposition (i.e. access to a “welcoming, safe and inclusive” third place) and its relational business model. Finally, the case shows that the mobilization of social memory assets does not necessarily lead to the use of nostalgic associations. In this case, for Starbucks, it is not a matter of cultivating memories of the “good old days” but of drawing inspiration from the past, of maintaining traditions to remain culturally relevant and of relying on these assets to project itself into the future.

This study explores the value co-creation framework to revive tradition-bound products using rhetorical history and service-dominant logic. This framework shows the effects of using historical significance to enable value co-creation in a new ecosystem by engaging consumers and local communities without eliminating their traditions. Existing studies merely discuss the methodology of a rhetorical emphasis on the authenticity of traditional industrial firms’ history to attract customers. This study explains the motivation to engage in value co-creation to transform tradition-bound businesses. Through these processes, businesses’ boundaries are thawed, and the customer becomes the advocate and thus, the driver of reviving tradition-bound products.

From its first depictions in ancient medical literature to contemporary depictions in brain imaging, mania has been largely associated with its Greek roots, \"to rage.\" Prior to the nineteenth century, \"mania\" was used interchangeably with \"madness.\" Although its meanings shifted over time, the word remained layered with the type of madness first-century writers described: rage, fury, frenzy. Even now, the mental illness we know as bipolar disorder describes conditions of extreme irritability, inflated grandiosity, and excessive impulsivity.Spanning several centuries,Manic Mindstraces the multiple ways in which the word \"mania\" has been used by popular, medical, and academic writers. It reveals why the rhetorical history of the word is key to appreciating descriptions and meanings of the \"manic\" episode.\" Lisa M. Hermsen examines the way medical professionals analyzed the manic condition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and offers the first in-depth analysis of contemporary manic autobiographies: bipolar figures who have written from within the illness itself.

This essay throws genealogical light upon contemporary theoretical practice by charting the relatively short history of rhetorical theory as a consequential sign in Anglophone discourse. It advances a historical sociology of knowledge inflected by feminist and postcolonial studies to trace the invention, institutionalization, and changing meanings of rhetorical theory from the late nineteenth century to the present. In the process, it illuminates three structuring patterns: (1) the valorization of European civilization that accompanied U.S. settler colonialism and its manifestation in universities where rhetorical theory materially grounded itself; (2) the gendered production of knowledge within academic institutions, particularly through the masculinization of the postwar university and its shaping of communities of inquiry invested in rhetorical theory; and (3) the power of relevance as a metonym for intellectual, political, and educational initiatives that, beginning in the late 1960s, enlarged rhetorical theory's community of inquiry and range of meanings.

This article reconsiders divergent accounts of the events leading to the death of Demosthenes, and suggests to explain their coexistence by attributing them to either the historical tradition from Hellenistic times or the rhetorical tradition of the Roman period. The latter should be traced to progymnasmata, or fictional rhetorical compositions, which manipulated historical evidence and continued to surface in the writings of students of rhetoric. When put together, the stories of the death of Demosthenes offer a case study on how history writing and rhetorical education mutually influenced each other in the late Hellenistic and Roman periods.

This article explores the roots of (African American) rhetorical theory through an examination of Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom. Rhetorical theory in this case is a forcible call for antislavery unity between races that at the same time rejects notions of the body as a racial essence. This essay attempts to make Douglass's rhetorical theory clear so that we can better understand how the key term functions today.