Historical Consciousness and Bounded Imagination: How History Inspires and Shapes Innovation in Long-Lived Firms

Unexpected observations from a study of ultra-centenary Japanese firms suggest that organizational longevity might affect how managers relate to past, present, and future, and how they approach change and innovation. To account for these observations, we borrow the notion of historical consciousness, originally developed at the intersection of philosophy and historiography, to indicate the continued salience of history in the present. Our findings suggest how historical consciousness might induce an approach to change—which we refer to as bounded imagination—that is simultaneously conservative and creative. These revelatory insights contribute to our understanding of how history and tradition can be mobilized as resources for action. They invite us, more generally, to expand our conceptualization of history in organizations—not only as a set of objective conditions and events (as in theories of imprinting and path dependence) or a discursive representation of the past (as in rhetorical history) but as subjective experience and interpretive frame shaping action in the present.