The Role of the Narrative

Oral history has been used inconsistently to study business history in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which reflects the failure of oral historians to recognize the value of business history and the failure of business historians and corporate archivists to appreciate oral history methodology. The dismissal of oral history as the collection of subjective, anecdotal accounts,^{Footnote 4} rife with errors of memory occurs only among those unacquainted with the past thirty years of scholarship in oral history methodology and narrative analysis.^{Footnote 5} Knowing how and why people remember past events, both individually and collectively, allows for a more comprehensive understanding by historians of those events. As Freund and Quilici observe, “By analyzing how historical actors make sense of the events they experienced, we can gain a fuller portrait of how history is shaped both by events and emotions.”^{Footnote 6} Oral history gives business historians the tools to access and interpret those memories.^{Footnote 7}

As Ronald Kroeze and Jasmijn Vervloet demonstrate in their article in this collection, oral history is less focused on fact-finding and more interested in understanding how people make sense of the past. Oral history interviews should be conducted with people at all levels of a business, to examine how decision makers—as well as those whose task it was to carry out decisions—understood those decisions, sometimes in very different ways.^{Footnote 8} Robert Crawford provides a useful example of this approach in this collection.

Oral history is of significant use to business historians interested in a narrative approach. As Kroeze and Keulen assert, “Narrative can help us understand how organizations, managers and leaders make use of their history.”^{Footnote 9} Further, as Kroeze and Vervloet also demonstrate in this collection, narrative approaches can help explain how employees, customers, and the general public have interpreted that history. Business historians are neither mythmakers nor debunkers; their role is to uncover the “daily use and effect of history in organizations and explain the actions of management.”^{Footnote 10} I would argue that actions and responses of employees and clients should be similarly examined by business historians interested in the full scope of a company’s history. The capacity of oral history to uncover meaning among the various groups involved in business is therefore of tremendous value in this process.

The recent call for a narrative approach to business history provides an opening to reassess the opportunities provided by oral history. As Hansen argues, storytelling is central to meaning making:

Without explicitly referencing oral history methodology, Hansen nonetheless invokes many of its interpretive claims. He writes that “narratives are shared and collective, not just individual stories,” and they are used “for constructing collective identity, imagined and epistemic communities, and organizational culture.”^{Footnote 12} Narratives structure the way the past is understood as well as the parts of the past to be forgotten.^{Footnote 13} What has been forgotten, silenced, and omitted is often the focus of oral history methodology.^{Footnote 14} Much as Portelli’s work has moved historians beyond tiresome debates about the “accuracy” of oral history,^{Footnote 15} Hansen argues that “by moving focus from whether narratives are true or false to narratives’ origins and effects, we can ask different questions that increase our understanding of capitalism at both the micro and the macro levels.”^{Footnote 16}

The Corporate Storytelling Industry

A for-profit corporate storytelling industry has emerged in the United States and the United Kingdom to meet the demands of businesses for narrative histories of their own organizations. Some of these corporate storytellers are quite clear about their function as vanity presses.^{Footnote 17} Many founders have their roots in public relations or marketing, not history.^{Footnote 18}

The History Factory (in the United States), founded in 1979, is perhaps the oldest of these corporate storytelling businesses. Its aim differs “from consortia of established academic faculty, such as the Business History Group” in that it does not produce “scholarly” business history.^{Footnote 19} Founder Bruce Weindruch has stated that, when conducting oral histories, the focus is on owners and managers rather than workers. In explaining that The History Factory charges corporations US$10,000 per interviewed person, Weindruch revealed why his clients tend not to request oral histories of lower-level employees.^{Footnote 20}

There are three significant problems with the corporate storytelling industry. The first, as noted in the case of The History Factory, is the breadth of research they provide. By not interviewing across all levels of a company—let alone clients, customers, suppliers, industry associates, or others—an incomplete (if not skewed) history is the result. A second concern revolves around the storytelling firms’ end product. Do companies that hire corporate storytelling firms provide free public access to the research, including oral histories? Are the oral histories and books that these for-profit storytellers generate merely celebratory or do they also offer scholarly insight? A third concern is the depth of research. Do these corporate storytellers have the freedom to investigate problematic parts of a company’s history? Even when companies approve the examination of the entirety of their past, for-profit storytellers may be hampered by their financial dependence on their clients. Some have suggested that it is for this reason that it is academic historians, not for-profit storytellers, to whom corporations turn when faced with controversies over their history.^{Footnote 21}

Similar questions can also be directed to research projects funded by industry and conducted by not-for-profit entities. Company-funded research projects risk producing corporate histories that fail to ask the difficult questions that von Plato and other historians deem necessary for a critical, historical approach.^{Footnote 22} As Durepos, Mills, and Mills found in their analysis of a company-funded history of Pan Am Airlines, “the convention in writing company histories has been to leave out the social and political processes in which the actors have actively engaged in order to craft the company history.”^{Footnote 23} Dillon notes that, as an interviewer for Tesco’s self-funded history, there was “a strange dichotomy between establishing a relationship with the interviewee and trying to keep a critical distance from the corporation.”^{Footnote 24} Dillon, however, was employed as a member of the National Life Stories Project at the British Library; as such, she and her coworkers were allowed to include shop-floor staff as interviewees without fear of losing their jobs. As mentioned above, those in the for-profit storytelling industry have a tendency to avoid interviews with lower-level workers as a cost-saving measure. Business historians, however, need to include “bottom-up perspectives from peripheral, low-power, ethnically diverse actors normally excluded from mainstream business history research.”^{Footnote 25}

The Petroleum Industry Oral History Project

The Petroleum Industry Oral History Project offers an instructive example. Begun by petroleum geologist Aubrey Kerr, this Canadian project has produced more than four hundred interviews over three phases from 1981 to the present. The Petroleum History Society was founded by Kerr and “a group of industry veterans, historians and archivists” after completion of the project’s first phase. The society took responsibility for the subsequent phases, which were funded by the society itself and provincial government grants. The project included the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists, the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists, and a number of oil companies. Transcripts for many interviews are available online through Calgary’s Glenbow Archives.^{Footnote 26}

Susan Birley and W. J. Wood, two of the project’s interviewers, described the first stage of the project. Birley notes, “From its inception, there has been an underlying conflict between those who feel that it was created for the benefit of the industry and those who regard it as a history project and therefore responsible to the dictates of historical objectivity.”^{Footnote 27} She notes that oral histories are one way to convince skeptical business people to embrace history, as “businessmen view oral testimony as harmless and a situation which is under their control.”^{Footnote 28} Indeed, the description provided of the Petroleum Industry Oral History Project’s process suggests that, in this case, control rested with industry rather than scholars. An advisory committee of industry retirees identified potential interviewees. Many read directly from notes prepared beforehand or treated the tape recorder as a Dictaphone during their interviews.^{Footnote 29} The committee also suggested interview questions. However, Wood observes: “From the outset there was an intuitive discomfort with this approach and after two months … the approach to selecting narrators for interviewing was changed.”^{Footnote 30} Interviewers now identified topics of interest, and the advisory committee subsequently recommended relevant potential interviewees.

In the project’s initial phases, these topics of interest ignored the relationship of Indigenous peoples to the petroleum industry.^{Footnote 31} Some narrators discussed negotiations with Indigenous peoples, communication with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, or the influence of the Berger Inquiry, but these topics were introduced by the narrators, not the interviewers.^{Footnote 32} Interviewers sometimes revealed their lack of interest by labeling the subject a “diversion” or by abruptly changing the topic.^{Footnote 33} These occasional, and at times disparaging or dismissive, references to Indigenous lands and rights hint at a broader, important story, as in this excerpt from an interview with former geophysicist and consultant Don Crane:

An exception to the project’s lack of interest in Indigenous peoples is Betty Cooper’s interview with Petroleum Industry Oral History Project founder and former petroleum geologist Aubrey Kerr.^{Footnote 35} Cooper comments that the reserves were “Indian lands that had their oil and gas rights.” At another point, Cooper pushes Kerr to clarify the role of Indigenous peoples in negotiations for drilling rights:

Later in the interview, Cooper challenges some of Kerr’s assumptions and stereotypes, asking more pointed questions. Kerr observes that negotiations with any one Indigenous group were always “separate from [those with] any other land of Indians.” She interjects, “Of course, I think that is something that one has to expect in dealing with different nations, which is what they are,” and then draws a comparison to the individual nations of Europe. At another point, Cooper confronts Kerr’s suggestion that government negotiators always acted in the best interest of Indigenous peoples:

Phase III of the project, which commenced in 2011 and focused on the oil sands, pays slightly more attention to the role of Indigenous peoples in the history of the Canadian petroleum industry. Two interviewers, Peter McKenzie-Brown and Adriana A. Davies, routinely asked if narrators would like to comment on their connections with Indigenous peoples.^{Footnote 36} However, they rarely followed up with subsequent questions, and tended to accept their narrators’ responses uncritically.^{Footnote 37} In one interview, for example, the interviewer concludes, “Syncrude [one of the largest oil sands companies in Canada] certainly has been applauded in terms of encouraging aboriginal entrepreneurship and also employment, so it’s nice to know that these initiatives happened when you were involved.”^{Footnote 38} In another, a question is preceded with the comment, “People complain a lot, yet the aboriginals, in my view, seemed to have benefited quite a bit from this [oil sands development] project.”^{Footnote 39} Although there is an increased awareness of the importance of Indigenous peoples to the history of Canada’s petroleum industry, there is little critical engagement with it, as evidenced by the following interview excerpt:

How might the Petroleum Oral History Project change in light of engagement with the work of Indigenous researchers on this subject? Lorraine Hoffman, for example, conducted oral histories with elders in the Wood Buffalo Region regarding the Athabasca oil sands.^{Footnote 41} Listening to these interviews might lead petroleum industry interviewers to revise their interview protocol. Without asking more challenging questions, particularly with regard to the interaction of the industry with Indigenous peoples, the project runs the risk of producing a sanitized history. Tracy Friedel has analyzed energy companies’ use of “the popular image of the Indian as environmental steward” to promote themselves “not only as environmentally friendly, but as friendly in a social sense through the inclusion of Aboriginal peoples as economic ‘partners’ in fossil fuel development.”^{Footnote 42} She argues that the rhetoric of corporate social responsibility “merely hide[s] the stark truth of contemporary development, that Canada’s energy infrastructure is increasingly subject to the interests of transnational corporations rather than the communities whose image they so readily appropriate.”^{Footnote 43} As it stands, the Petroleum Industry Oral History Project could be critiqued in the same way.

TRC’s Call to Action No. 92

A more transparent and critical business history, one that is honest about corporations’ past mistakes, is needed. The work of the Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte and others in the 1980s precipitated a revolution in German business history, forcing academics, businesses, and society to finally come to terms with corporate complicity with the Third Reich.^{Footnote 44} Canada still needs to come to terms with the historical impact of business on its Indigenous populations, and those businesses’ complicity in settler colonial capitalism.^{Footnote 45} The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action report includes no. 92: “Business and Reconciliation.”^{Footnote 46} The Canadian TRC did not interrogate business in the same way as did the South African TRC, which “held hearings on the moral complicity of business in apartheid, calling on companies to account not just for active collaboration … but for profiting from and sustaining the apartheid economy.”^{Footnote 47} Nonetheless, there is much that is required of Canadian business in light of the TRC. Jean Paul Gladu, chief executive officer of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business, observes: “While many Canadian companies are proactively seeking to engage aboriginal peoples, we must continue to encourage Corporate Canada not to ignore the importance of economic reconciliation.”^{Footnote 48} Business historians that engage with the oral traditions of Indigenous people, conduct high-quality oral histories with a wide range of participants, and openly confront the business community’s role in ongoing colonial dispossession in Canada can make a helpful contribution to this reconciliation process.

This is not just a Canadian problem. Business historians worldwide need to embrace narrative and oral histories to bring to light the historical effects of business on Indigenous peoples and the environment. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognizes that Indigenous peoples around the globe “have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, thus preventing them from exercising, in particular, their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests.”^{Footnote 49} As Andrew Smith observes, few business historians are actively engaging with the extensive literature on colonialism.^{Footnote 50} Eventually, however, business will have to answer for its involvement in the treatment of Indigenous peoples, environmental change, and other issues of contemporary relevance. Historians will write about these matters whether or not corporations provide access to their records. When this happens, interpreting settler–colonial archival records will require increased attention to narrative and the methodology of oral history.^{Footnote 51} As I have shown, however, this task cannot be left in the hands of business or the for-profit storytelling industry alone.