TY - JOUR A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Rintamäki, Jukka A1 - Fleming, Peter A1 - Spicer, André T1 - On the Forgetting of Corporate Irresponsibility JF - Academy of Management Review N2 - 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. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2014.0208 SN - 0363-7425 VL - 41 IS - 4 SP - 720 EP - 738 ER -