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The increasing use of digital technologies in organizational contexts, like collaborative social platforms, has not only changed the way people work but also provided organizations with new and wide ranges of data sources that could be analyzed to enhance organizational- and individual-level outcomes, especially when integrated with more traditional tools. In this study, we explore the relationship between data flows generated by employees on companies’ digital environments and employees’ attitudes measured through surveys. In a sample of 107 employees, we collected data on the number and types of actions performed on the company’s digital collaborative platform over a two-year period and the level of organizational embeddedness (fit, sacrifice, and links dimensions) through two rounds of surveys over the same period. The correlation of the quantity and quality of digital actions with the variation of organizational embeddedness over the same period shows that workers who engaged in more activities on the digital platform also experienced an increase in their level of organizational embeddedness mainly in the fit dimension. In addition, the higher the positive variation of fit, the more employees performed both active and passive digital actions. Finally, the higher the variation of organizational embeddedness, the more employees performed networking digital behaviors.

Accounting for organizational history is essential to any change process. We argue, however, that the intentional revision of that history also can be important. We treat history as malleable, because events and actions from the past are susceptible to reinterpretation as organizations try to align with the way they see themselves in the present and want to see themselves in the future. Because change is a prospective, future‐oriented process, whereas sensemaking is a retrospective, past‐oriented process, making sense of the future requires an ability to envision the future as having already occurred, i.e. to think in the future perfect tense. We offer an initial conceptual exploration of organizational change from a revisionist history perspective that turns on future perfect thinking, a view that enlarges our conceptualization of the ways in which history affects organizational adaptation and change.

Serves as an introduction to the special issue on the strategic use of the past and future in organizations published in the Journal of Organizational Change Management. The issue of how organizations and their members appropriate the past and future in the context of organizational identity is examined.