Stories told within institutions play a powerful role, helping to define not only the institution itself, but also its individual members. How do institutions use stories? How do those stories both preserve the past and shape the future? To what extent does narrative construct both collective and individual identity? Charlotte Linde's unique and far-reaching study addresses these questions by looking at the interplay of narratives, memory, and identity in a large insurance company. Her detailed ethnography looks at the role of stories within the institution and how they are employed by its members in both private and group settings. Analyzing the re-telling of certain key stories, she shows how the formation of "core" stories and their multiple re-tellings and modifications provide a means of formulating and promoting a cohesive group identity - which in turn shapes the stories and identities of the individuals within the collective. Linde also looks at silences, and how stories not told also convey their version of the past. Working the Past shows how stories that might otherwise be seen as part of mundane daily life are in fact utterly essential to the formation and maintenance of individual and group identity. Her original research will appeal to those interested in narrative studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and institutional memory.

The work we do brings us meaning, moulds our values, determines our social status and dictates how we spend most of our time. But this wasn't always the case: for 95% of our species' history, work held a radically different importance. How, then, did work become the central organisational principle of our societies? How did it transform our bodies, our environments, our views on equality and our sense of time? And why, in a time of material abundance, are we working more than ever before?

At certain moments in his political essays, Kant conceives of socio-historical emancipation as a process of working ourselves out of pathological legacies, suggesting that emancipation would involve a process of working through our affective attachments to entrenched, regressive social arrangements. Jackson shows how Freud’s analyses of melancholia, mania and the work of mourning can contribute to an understanding of key dimensions of such pathological social fixations, as well as the possibility of working through the past. This book argues that bringing Freud’s provocative analyses of loss to bear on particular philosophical treatments of history leads to a more coherent, psychoanalytically informed understanding of history. Although Freud does not himself integrate these themes into a theory of socio-political emancipation, his thinking nonetheless can be read as contributing to such a theory. To develop this idea the book draws on thinkers such as Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler. The book engages students and scholars of contemporary continental philosophy by arguing for connections between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theory.

A fascinating photographic chronicle of Britain's industrial heritage.

This book invites archaeologists to approach the significant process of recycling within the archaeological record at two different levels: of artefacts and of landscape.

DuBois traces how state repression and community militancy are remembered in a neighborhood in Buenos Aires and how the tangled and ambiguous legacies of the past continued to shape ordinary people's lives years after the collapse of the military regime.

This book places current and future work team practices in historical context. Researchers from 10 countries have contributed chapters that represent developments specific to their regions and that illustrate the way ideas spread around the world. Some principles of effective teaming were independently discovered in different countries, and some principles emerged from the work of researchers like Trist, Emery, and Lewin and spread around the world. But all of the practices were driven by the dynamic tension between the psychology of the employee and business necessities. Theories and cases describe autonomous work groups, self-managed work teams, cell teams, and other collaborative work structures. Contributions to the design of such structures came from psychology, management, sociology, industrial engineering, and manufacturing. Because of the challenges inherent in reorganising work around teams instead of individuals, organizations are at different stages in evolving into 21st century work systems.