Legacies in the Making at the ICTY

Viviane Dittrich re-visits the institutional endeavour of leaving a legacy in light of completion, closure, and continuation. Her contribution explores how the proliferation of tribunal-driven legacy projects and efforts of documentation, memorialization, and legacy building has shaped and continues shaping the actual legacy process. The chapter shows that legacy formation is a continuous process, placing the social construction of legacies at the centre of the analysis. The chapter sets the approaches of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in perspective in relation to its Completion Strategy and the ongoing work of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. In view of the impending closure of the Tribunal and the spectre of organizational death, the chapter discusses legacy building in terms of language, conceptualization, and institutionalization.

Identity Processes to Trigger Turnaround in Response to Organizational Decline

This article proposes a model of identity-related social processes that, when applied during organizational decline, is hypothesized to support turnaround and avoid organizational death. The social processes are retiring, reclaiming, reaffirming, regenerating, and reimagining identity attributes. Although this model is rooted in past studies and literature on organizational decline and organizational identity, empirical research is needed to validate or adjust the model. Future work could involve examination of identity negotiations within past cases of organizational decline and turnaround as well as devising and testing specific retiring, reclaiming, reaffirming, regenerating, and reimagining interventions.

Transitivity, hierarchy and reciprocity of organizational communication network during crisis

Purpose – This paper aims to explore changes in communication networks during organizational crisis. In the literature, various terms such as organizational mortality, organizational death, bankruptcy, decline, retrenchment and failure have been used to characterize different forms and facets of organizational crisis. Communication network studies have typically focussed on nodes (e.g. individuals or organizations), relationships between those nodes and subsequent affects of these relationships upon the network as a whole. Email networks in contemporary organizations are fairly representative of the underlying communication networks. Design/methodology/approach – The changing communication network structure at Enron Corporation during the crisis period (2000-2001) has been analyzed. The goal is to understand how communication patterns and structures are affected by organizational crisis. Drawing on communication network crisis and group behaviour theory, three propositions are tested: communication network becomes increasingly transitive as organizations experience crisis; communication network becomes less hierarchical as organizations are going through crisis; and communication network becomes more reciprocal as organizations are going through crisis. Findings – In this research analysis, the support of these three propositions was noticed. The results of tests and their implications are discussed in this paper. Originality/value – This study builds on an emerging stream of research area that applies social network analysis to organizational interaction data to study various questions related to organizational change and disintegration. These findings could help managers in designing an effective approach to monitor regular functionalities of their organizations.