Introduction : how institutions remember -- Data for the study : the MidWest Insurance Company -- Occasions for institutional remembering -- Retold tales : repeated narratives as a resource for institutional remembering -- Multiple versions of MidWest's history -- Three versions of one story : a comparison -- Paradigmatic narratives : exemplary narratives of everyman -- Narrative and intertextuality : telling one's own story within a textual community -- Noisy silences : stories not told -- Working the past : identity and memory.