Learning to use the past: the development of a rhetorical history strategy by the London headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Organization studies scholars are increasingly interested in how managers use the past to obtain competitive advantage. Little research has been done on the history of the corporate use of history which means that we know little about the circumstances in which the corporate use of rhetorical history was pioneered. This paper historicizes rhetorical history. It uses the experience of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) to develop understanding of how companies used the past to advance interests in the face of political threats. Founded in 1670, the HBC is one of the oldest firms in the Western world. For much of its history, its senior managers invested few resources in the firm’s ‘heritage infrastructure’ and rarely used history in its communication with outside stakeholders. This paper shows how it learned to use history as a strategic asset gradually and by observing other firms. At the end of World War I, it began to make substantial investments in heritage infrastructure. This allowed the firm to turn its long history into an asset. This paper stresses the politicized nature of the corporate use of the past.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it