Business Professor Presents Paper at Statewide Faculty Conference

A faculty member in Pennsylvania College of Technology's School of Business and Computer Technologies presented a paper at the 29th annual meeting of the Association of Pennsylvania University Business and Economics Faculty, held earlier this month in State College.

Irwin H. Siegel, professor of business administration/business law and recipient of Penn College's 2005 Master Teacher Award, presented "Questioning the Impact of Organizational Memory on Organizational Performance: A Case Study of the Studebaker Corporation" on the opening day of the Oct. 5-6 conference.

Siegel's paper, which was published in the conference proceedings, questioned a recent study that claimed "organizational memory" stored information from an organization's history that can be brought to bear on present decisions has a strong positive impact on organizational performance.

"My paper applied the factors developed by the authors in the prior study, through which they made their claim, to Studebaker Corp., an American automobile manufacturer steeped in 'organizational memory,' yet which ceased its automobile production in the U.S. in 1963, closing its famous plant in South Bend, Ind.," Siegel explained. "My conclusion is that attempts to directly link concepts such as organizational memory with organizational performance should be limited in scope and may well be problematic."

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