This paper examines how strategy‐makers attempt to
reconcile change initiatives with organizational values and principles
laid out long before and still encased in strategic identity statements
such as corporate mottos and philosophies. It reveals three discursive
strategies that strategy‐makers use to establish a sense of continuity
in time of change: elaborating (transferring part of the content of the
historical statement into a new one), recovering (forging a new
statement based on the retrieval and re‐use of historical references),
and decoupling (allowing the co‐existence of the historical statement
and a contemporary one). By so doing, our study advances research on
uses of the past, it establishes important linkages between identity and
strategy research, and enhances our understanding of the
intergenerational transfer of values in family firms.

Crafting a new corporate philosophy or mission statement
can help implement strategic change, but can also be experienced as a
disruption in people's sense of “who we are” as an organization. This
paper reveals a variety of strategies that managers can use to deal with
the tension between promoting change and maintaining a sense of
continuity with a distant, revered past. By doing so, it helps managers
confronting these issues deal with the enabling and constraining effects
of the past. While this is a more general challenge for organizations
with historical legacies, it is a particularly delicate issue for family
firms grappling with the need to transfer values from one generation to
the next, while retaining flexibility to change and adapt over time.