The Firm that Would Not Die : Post-Death Organizing, Alumni Events, and Organization Ghosts

We show that alumni events are not only settings where professional identities are renewed in social gatherings, or simply instruments to build and sustain commercially valuable networks. They are also continuous with the organizations they notionally celebrate by reproducing features of these organizations long after they cease to exist. Based primarily on participant observation of three annual lunches for alumni of the former accountancy firm Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and interviews with participants, organizers and non-participants, we show how an alumni event re-enacts social relations which were formed during intense working in small groups. However, we also show that while the “dead” firm as an organization is an indistinct object for event participants, they unintentionally produce an approximate picture of the firm structure that once existed via the execution of their seating preferences. Far from being a trivial emergent outcome, our data proposes the possibility of a “ghostly” post-death afterlife for organizations. We develop this specific concept of organizational ghost at the intersection of studies of alumni events, post-death organizing and ghostliness to explore its potential to theorise the life, death and afterlife of organizations. We suggest that our study points to a broader research agenda in the form of “organizational traceologies”