Dealing with revered past: Historical identity statements and strategic change in Japanese family firms

Research Summary This paper examines how strategy‐makers attempt to reconcile change initiatives with organizational values and principles laid out long before, still encased in strategic identity statements such as corporate mottos and philosophies. It reveals three discursive strategies that strategy‐makers use to establish a sense of continuity in time of change: elaborating (transferring part of the content of the historical statement into a...