On 15 November at 10:00 in room M107, there will be an OSA seminar by Nilüfer Yapici entitled

"Forgetting Work and Recurring Corporate Social Irresponsibility”

Nilüfer is a faculty member at the Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus, with a PhD from Florida Atlantic University, USA

Abstract
Despite of institutional pressures on firms to act ethically and responsibly, corporations keep on committing irresponsible acts leading to environmental disasters, e.g., the Kalamazoo River Oil Spill, Ivory Coast’s Toxic Waste Dumping, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. We argue that making sure that the careless incidents are forgotten, corporations protect their image and maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of shareholders and the state. We develop a comprehensive model explaining how socially irresponsible firms revert to their usual self after triggering environmental disasters. We show that a collective project of social forgetting is possible when specific institutional pressures on the organization are muted and organization successfully co-opts various external stakeholders, such as politicians, members of community having suffered irresponsible behavior, communities in which the organization operates and etc. While efforts of forgetting work rely on the continuity of corporate political activity of the corporations, influence of CSR on forgetting work is debatable mainly due to nature of CSR activities of the irresponsible firm. CSR efforts fail to affect communities especially when they add to the marginalization of the communities involved by excluding their voice in activities that were designed for them, making such efforts not only ineffective but also unethical. Our model contributes to the literature on forgetting work by showing how irresponsible corporations engage in short and long-term forgetting work once they cause an environmental disaster and highlighting the plurality of voices and interpretations in mnemonic processes involved in narratives regarding corporate irresponsibility.

For more information, please contact Mikael Søndergaard

Everyone is welcome!