posted on 2019-04-10, 10:46authored bySebastien Mena, Jukka Rintamaki, Peter Fleming, Andre Spicer
Why are some serious cases of corporate irresponsibility collectively forgotten? Drawing on social memory studies, we examine how this collective forgetting process can occur. We propose that a major instance of corporate irresponsibility leads to the emergence of a stakeholder mnemonic community that shares a common recollection of the past incident. This community generates and then draws on mnemonic traces to sustain a collective memory of the past event over time. In addition to the natural entropic tendency to forget, collective memory is also undermined by instrumental “forgetting work,” which we conceptualize in this article. Forgetting work involves manipulating short-term conditions of the event, silencing vocal “rememberers,” and undermining collective mnemonic traces that sustain a version of the past. This process can result in a reconfigured collective memory and collective forgetting of corporate irresponsibility events. Collective forgetting can have positive and negative consequences for the firm, stakeholders, and society.
History
School
Loughborough University London
Published in
Academy of Management Review
Volume
41
Issue
4
Pages
720 - 738
Citation
MENA, S. ... et al, 2015. On the forgetting of corporate irresponsibility. Academy of Management Review, 41 (4), pp.720-738.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2015-09-08
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Academy of Management Review and the definitive published version is also available at https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2014.0208.