LAUSR

People have a long-term personal attachment to objects they use in their personal andwork lives. They attach their identity to these because objects give meaning to their personal achievements. They are a form of credentialing, small monuments memorializing one’s inclusion in an institution and acceptance of its values, behaviors, and purposes. Wear a lapel pin and you signal your identity and conformance to a community. In politics, pins also signal who is excluded, such as Jews in Germany in the 1930s not wearing Nazi Party pins, MAGA hats by Americans in the 2010s identifying who they are not associated with. Three-dimensional ephemera speak to values and tribalism, and their attendant allegiances. These signal one’s permission to someone to guide his or her values and activities. Historians have made insufficient progress linking the personal relevance of objects to the broader institutional histories they write about. Yet enterprises, government agencies, organizations, clubs, and other institutions consist of people. Objects and people together comprise components of a broader ecosystem of a company, an industry, or economy. Linking objects, people and institutions enrich an historian’s understanding of people, organizations, and their history. I am a business historian who worked for a corporation for decades. What follows is an advocacy for the greater study of objects, relying largely on my experience in studying the history of IBM, the longest surviving computer company of the 20th century.