Understandings of long-term perceptions of corporate irresponsibility, and how corporate irresponsibility is remembered over time are still in a nascent phase. This project has produced new insights in two key ways. Empirically, this project is (to the researcher’s knowledge) the first one that studies the specific ways in which firms conduct so-called mnemonic work (i.e. activity to influence audience perceptions of their pasts) of corporate irresponsibility, and more generally the struggle of what the public perception of past irresponsibility will look like. This project has highlighted the use of disconnecting the past from the present as a discursive strategy to deal with corporate irresponsibility on the one hand, and the more general tendency of producing simplistic narratives of past corporate irresponsibility with clearly assigned blame, resulting in the crowding out of more complex, nuanced alternative versions of the past.
The second key way is conceptual, though still largely based on the empirics of the project. Prior research on organizations and collective memory has focused on how corporations make use of the past in ways that benefit them. In other words they have focused on corporate agency. One key insight of this project is that these types of uses of the past, or mnemonic work, are always contingent on the cultural framework of each point of time. The cultural framework acts as boundaries for what kinds of narratives are credible at that point of time. This insight sets limits to the agency corporations have in such processes, and proposes a more honest, balanced lens for analysing organizations and collective memory. However, the key insight of collective memory remains (and is further reinforced): that shared perceptions of past acts and events of corporate irresponsibility are fickle, unreliable, and vulnerable to manipulation.
This final point has wider societal implications. Corporate social responsibility has become a policy for many countries, as it has for the European Union. The notion of corporate social responsibility relies on the assumption that stakeholders will keep firms in check, and will prevent corporate irresponsibility. But if collective memory of such instances of corporate irresponsibility are fickle, unreliable, and prone to manipulation, then it can be inferred that such stakeholder pressure will be weak over the long term in all but the most exceptional cases. And that the bases on which past events are collectively analysed – the cultural framework – fluctuate constantly, sometimes very rapidly, only make collective memories less reliable than manipulation of interested actors alone would. For such reasons, corporate social responsibility is not an effective policy tool at least for preventing corporate irresponsibility, as its basis, stakeholder pressure, is unlikely to be effective in the long term.
