Organizational Memory and Knowledge Transfer in Agri-Food Organization: the Corporate Museum Way

Abstract

Corporate museums represent an unexplored phenomenon under various aspects. In fact, numerous studies on corporate museum focus on marketing aspects. Although, the first corporate museums appeared in the early 1900s, few studies have addressed this phenomenon from the perspective of organizational memory and the transfer of knowledge. This study fits into this gap in the literature. From the perspective of organizational theory, the study analyzes the phenomenon of the corporate museum as a mechanism for knowledge transfer and organizational memory. To achieve this goal, this work uses a descriptive qualitative methodology, based on the analysis of a public dataset. The corporate museums in Italy were analyzed, with particular attention to the agri-food sector. The results of this study, highlight that the corporate museum assumes a strategic value to reduce the risk of “organizational forgetting” and increase the sharing of organizational culture. This study offers some first observations on the phenomenon of the corporate museum and the relationship with organizational memory