Abstract

"Craft as Memory Filter: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Ambivalent Legacies of Family Business"

Morten Tinning, Copenhagen Business School (mti.bhl@cbs.dk), Christina Lubinski, Copenhagen Business School (cl.bhl@cbs.dk)

Failure is often framed as an event, process, or opportunity for learning. Yet failure also emerges in more subtle forms, in what organizations strategically forget, obscure, or reframe. This paper examines how family firms deploy histories of “craft” as a filter that preserves legitimacy while concealing rupture. In doing so, it reframes failure not only as the collapse of ventures but also as the silencing of conflict and exclusion in business history and memory.

Based on a qualitative study of two German family enterprises, the analysis draws on more than fifty years of house magazines, archival documents, and commemorative rituals. These sources reveal how craft was invoked as a moral inheritance, ritualized through jubilees and rites of passage, and materialized in objects and spaces. Such practices sustained the legitimacy of family ownership and succession by presenting craft as timeless continuity. Yet they also reframed labor disputes as family disagreements, modernization as smooth adaptation, and succession as male destiny, thereby filtering out the fractures and disputes that marked lived organizational experience.

We explore craft as a memory filter through which family firms elevate certain pasts while silencing others. This framing highlights the ethical ambivalence of craft. On one side, it inspires stewardship, cohesion, and identity; on the other, it naturalizes hierarchy, marginalizes dissent, and obscures rupture. By looking at craft in this way, the paper extends scholarship on family business history and memory studies. It demonstrates how organizational remembering is entangled with forgetting, and how traditions celebrated as virtues can also function as forms of silencing and ethical failure.