TY - JOUR A1 - Foroughi, Hamid A1 - Coraiola, Diego M. A1 - Rintamäki, Jukka A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Foster, William M. ED - Kolb, Darl ED - Huysman, Marleen ED - Dery, Kristine ED - Metiu, Anca T1 - Organizational Memory Studies JF - Organization Studies N2 - This paper provides an overview and discussion of the rapidly growing literature on organizational memory studies (OMS). We define OMS as an inquiry into the ways that remembering and forgetting shape, and are shaped by, organizations and organizing processes. The contribution of this article is threefold. We briefly review what we understand by organizational memory and explore some key debates and points of contestation in the field. Second, we identify four different perspectives that have been developed in OMS (functional, interpretive, critical and performative) and expand upon each perspective by showcasing articles published over the past decade. In particular, we examine four papers previously published in Organization Studies to show the distinctiveness of each perspective. Finally, we identify a number of areas for future research to facilitate the future development of OMS. KW - - KW - memory KW - collective memory KW - forgetting KW - historical organization studies KW - mnemonics KW - remembering KW - rhetorical history KW - social memory KW - literature review KW - organizational learning Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840620974338 SN - 0170-8406 SN - 1741-3044 VL - 41 IS - 12 SP - 1725 EP - 1748 PB - SAGE Publications CY - Sage UK: London, England ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cavotta, Valeria A1 - Mena, Sébastien T1 - Prosocial Organizing and the Distance Between Core and Community Work JF - Organization Studies N2 - Research on prosocial organising has made great strides in understanding how organisations foster durable social change through core work directly targeting specific beneficiaries (e.g. work integration), and also through community work to obtain the cooperation of key stakeholders. Yet, extant research tends to focus on community work that is closely related – or proximal – to core work and is thus weakly equipped to explain how seemingly unrelated, distal community work unfolds. To address this puzzle, we study an Italian work integration social enterprise that engaged in anti-Mafia work to support its core work of reintegrating people with mental health issues. We unveiled the process whereby it came to engage in this distal community work, how this work facilitated the destigmatisation of the beneficiaries and, ultimately, their reintegration in the community. We contribute to the literature on prosocial organising by providing a more complex and nuanced view of the relationship between core and community work, as well as how to manage stigma. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406221099696 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Brès, Luc A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Salles-Djelic, Marie-Laure T1 - Exploring the formal and informal roles of regulatory intermediaries in transnational multi-stakeholder regulation JF - Regulation & Governance N2 - Research on regulation and regulatory processes has traditionally focused on two prominent roles: rulemaking and rule‐taking. Recently, the mediating role of third party actors, regulatory intermediaries, has started to be explored – notably in a dedicated special issue of the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The present special issue extends this line of research by elaborating the distinction between formal and informal modes of regulatory intermediation, in the specific context of transnational multistakeholder regulation. In this introduction, we identify two key dimensions of intermediation (in)formalism: officialization and formalization. This allows us to develop a typology of intermediation in multistakeholder regulatory processes: formal, interpretive, alternative, and emergent. Leveraging examples from the papers in this special issue, we discuss how these four types of intermediation coexist and evolve over time. Finally, we elaborate on the implications of our typology for regulatory processes and outcomes. Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12249 SN - 1748-5991 VL - 13 IS - 2 SP - 127 EP - 140 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Waeger, Daniel A1 - Mena, Sébastien T1 - Activists as moral entrepreneurs: How shareholder activists brought active ownership to Switzerland JF - Research in the Sociology of Organizations N2 - Action from activists is at the origin of many initiatives that end up injecting moral concerns into the way companies operate. In such instances, activists function as moral entrepreneurs that lastingly change the definition of what constitutes morally acceptable corporate behavior. Yet, in order to have such a lasting effect on companies, activist efforts need to pass through multiple stages that deal with both the effective mobilization of their own constituents and the triggering of corporate responses that can induce broader change in the economy. In the present chapter, the authors study how local shareholder activists initiated and helped sustain the process that led to the establishment of active ownership in Switzerland between 1997 and 2011. Active ownership refers to the active engagement of shareholders with firms to push them toward considering environmental, social, and corporate governance criteria in their decision-making. The case illustrates the processual nature of moralizing dynamics initiated by activists and emphasizes the long-term and cumulative nature of many moralization projects. Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20190000063017 SN - 0733-558X VL - 63 SP - 167 EP - 186 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mena, Sébastien T1 - Book review: Private governance: Creating order in economic and social life, by Edward P. Stringham JF - Business Ethics Quarterly Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2017.38 SN - 2153-3326 VL - 27 IS - 4 SP - 641 EP - 644 ER - 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 - TY - JOUR A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Suddaby, Roy T1 - Theorization as institutional work: The dynamics of roles and practices JF - Human Relations N2 - This study unpacks the construct of theorization – the process by which organizational ideas become delocalized and abstracted into theoretical models to support their diffusion across time and space. We adopt an institutional work lens to analyse the key components of theorization in contexts where institutional work is in transition from changing institutions to maintaining them. We build on a longitudinal inductive study of theorization by the Fair Labor Association – a private regulatory initiative that created and then enforced a code of conduct for working conditions in apparel factories. Our study reveals that when institutional work shifts from changing to maintaining an institutional arrangement of corporate social responsibility, there is a key change in how the Fair Labor Association theorizes roles and practices related to this arrangement. We observe that theorization on key practices largely remains intact, whereas the roles of different actors are theorized in a dramatically different manner. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the work involved in the aftermath of radical change by demonstrating the relative plasticity of roles over the rigidity of practices. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726715622556 SN - 1741-282X VL - 69 IS - 8 SP - 1669 EP - 1708 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mena, Sébastien T1 - Book Review: Samuel F. Mansell Capitalism, Corporations and the Social Contract: A Critique of Stakeholder Theory JF - Organization Studies Y1 - 2016 SN - 0170-8406 (print), 1741-3044 (online) U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840616631716 VL - 37 IS - 5 SP - 735 EP - 738 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Waeger, Daniel T1 - Activism for corporate responsibility: Conceptualizing private regulation opportunity structures JF - Journal of Management Studies N2 - In this article, we examine how private regulatory initiatives (PRIs) – which define standards for corporate responsibility (CR) issues and sometimes monitor their application by firms – create opportunities and constraints for activist groups aiming to push firms towards more stringent CR activities. Drawing on social movement theory, we conceptualize how private regulation opportunity structures affect such CR‐based activist groups' targets and tactics at both the firm and field levels. At the field level, we argue that both radical and reformative activist groups direct most of their time and resources towards PRIs with comparatively more stringent standards. At the firm level, while radical activist groups are likely to target firms participating in more stringent PRIs, reformative activist groups target firms participating in less stringent PRIs, or those that do not participate in PRIs at all. When facing unfavourable opportunity structures, CR‐based activist groups tend either to advocate the creation of new PRIs or to shift their activities to pressure other focal points. This article contributes to moving beyond extant literature's emphasis of PRIs as settlements of contentious firm–activist interactions towards also viewing them as starting points for activist groups aiming to push firms towards a more substantive CR engagement. Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12092 SN - 1467-6486 VL - 51 IS - 7 SP - 1091 EP - 1117 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Palazzo, Guido T1 - Input and Output Legitimacy of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives JF - Business Ethics Quarterly N2 - In a globalizing world, governments are not always able or willing to regulate the social and environmental externalities of global business activities. Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI), defined as global institutions involving mainly corporations and civil society organizations, are one type of regulatory mechanism that tries to fill this gap by issuing soft law regulation. This conceptual paper examines the conditions of a legitimate transfer of regulatory power from traditional democratic nation-state processes to private regulatory schemes, such as MSIs. Democratic legitimacy is typically concerned with input legitimacy (rule credibility, or the extent to which the regulations are perceived as justified) and output legitimacy (rule effectiveness, or the extent to which the rules effectively solve the issues). In this study, we identify MSI input legitimacy criteria (inclusion, procedural fairness, consensual orientation, and transparency) and those of MSI output legitimacy (rule coverage, efficacy, and enforcement), and discuss their implications for MSI democratic legitimacy. Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5840/beq201222333 VL - 22 IS - 3 SP - 527 EP - 556 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - de Leede, Marieke A1 - Baumann, Dorothée A1 - Black, Nicky A1 - Lindeman, Sara A1 - McShane, Lindsay T1 - Advancing the business & human rights agenda: Dialogue, empowerment and constructive engagement JF - Journal of Business Ethics N2 - As corporations are going global, they are increasingly confronted with human rights challenges. As such, new ways to deal with human rights challenges in corporate operations must be developed as traditional governance mechanisms are not always able to tackle them. This article presents five different views on innovative solutions for the relationships between business and human rights that all build on empowerment, dialogue and constructive engagement. The different approaches highlight an emerging trend toward a more active role for corporations in the protection of human rights. The first examines the need for enhanced dialogue between corporations and their stakeholders. The next three each examine a different facet of empowerment, a critical factor for the respect and protection of human rights: empowerment of the poor, of communities, and of consumers. The final one presents a case study of constructive corporate engagement in Myanmar (Burma). Altogether, these research projects provide insight into the complex relationships between corporate operations and human rights, by highlighting the importance of stakeholder dialogue and empowerment. All the five projects were presented during the Second Swiss Master Class in Corporate Social Responsibility, held in Lausanne, Switzerland on December 12, 2008. The audience for this conference, which examined business and human rights, was composed of researchers, governmental representatives, and business and non-governmental organization practitioners. Y1 - 2010 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0188-8 SN - 1573-0697 VL - 93 IS - 1 SP - 161 EP - 188 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Palazzo, Guido A1 - Mena, Sébastien T1 - Can tobacco companies be good corporate citizens? JF - Revue Médicale Suisse N2 - Tobacco companies have jumped on the Corporate social responsibility (CSR) bandwagon as a tentative to be societally accepted as responsible actors and good corporate citizens. This is however not possible for two reasons. First, the product they sell is lethal and thus not compatible with the precondition of doing no harm to be a good corporate citizen. Second, the behavior of tobacco firms is not responsible, being illustrated by four examples: junk science versus sound science strategy, seducing young smokers, political lobbying and getting customers on new markets. To conclude, three implications for regulating the activities of the tobacco industry are given. T2 - Les entreprises du tabac peuvent-elles être citoyennes ? Y1 - 2009 SN - 1660-9379 VL - 210 SP - 1454 EP - 1456 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - McCarthy, L. A1 - Mena, Sébastien T1 - Institutional work and (ir)responsible management T2 - Research Handbook of Responsible Management Y1 - 2020 SN - 9781788971959 SP - 654 EP - 669 PB - Edward Elgar ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Rintamäki, Jukka T1 - Managing the past responsibly: A collective memory perspective on responsibility, sustainability and ethics T2 - Research Handbook of Responsible Management Y1 - 2020 SN - 9781788971959 SP - 470 EP - 483 PB - Edward Elgar ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Palazzo, Guido A1 - Mena, Sébastien ED - Palazzo, Guido ED - Wentland, Maia T1 - Business and Human Rights T2 - Responsible Management Practices for the XXIst Century Y1 - 2011 SN - 9782744074929 SP - 23 EP - 30 PB - Pearson CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gond, Jean-Pascal A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Mosonyi, Szilvia T1 - Meta-reviewing the business and society field through sociological paradigms: Towards pluralistic re-presentations of corporate social responsibility JF - Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society N2 - Although the growth of the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) calls for more diverse exercises of reviewing, most reviews of CSR research present the organising categories on which they build as taken-for-granted. In so doing, they reify a structural-functionalist orientation and a linear view of time while failing to represent accurately alternative post-structural and anti-structural CSR paradigms. Building on an analysis of 40 reviews of the CSR field and on insights from the social studies of science, this paper revisits the notion of field re-presentation and highlights the need for building on categories, which embed a richer set of ontological assumptions to represent the CSR field in a manner that could maintain a dose of ontological and epistemological pluralism and diversity. We finally discuss the implications of our analysis to enhance CSR theory-building, cross-fertilize insights from distinct CSR paradigms and develop alternative assumptions to investigate empirically CSR phenomena. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5840/iabsproc2017288 SN - 2160-6900 VL - 28 SP - 56 EP - 57 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Waeger, Daniel A1 - Mena, Sébastien T1 - The diffusion of contested practices across environments: Social movements’ boundary-bridging role JF - Best Paper Proceedings of the 2013 Academy of Management Annual Meeting N2 - We examine the diffusion across country institutional environments of a corporate practice that is contested by potential adopters. We show that the diffusion process is in crucial ways driven by the mobilization of social movement activists in favour of the corporate practice in the target institutional environment. We further show that social movement activism is particularly relevant for the pioneering introduction of a foreign practice into a new institutional environment in the early stages of the diffusion process, while more conventional institutional pressures become relevant at later stages of the process. Results from the study of the adoption of the corporate governance practice ‘say on pay’ by Swiss companies between 2007 and 2012 largely support our hypotheses and underline the boundary-bridging role of transnationally connected social movement activists. Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2013.193 SN - 2151-6561 VL - 2013 IS - 1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gond, Jean-Pascal A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Mosonyi, Szilvia T1 - The performativity of literature reviewing: Constituting the corporate social responsibility literature through re-presentation and intervention JF - Organizational Research Methods N2 - Although numerous books and articles provide toolkit approaches to explain how to conduct literature reviews, these prescriptions regard literature reviewing as the production of representations of academic fields. Such representationalism is rarely questioned. Building on insights from social studies of science, we conceptualize literature reviewing as a performative endeavor that co-constitutes the literature it is supposed to “neutrally” describe, through a dual movement of re-presenting—constructing an account different from the literature, and intervening—adding to and potentially shaping this literature. We discuss four problems inherent to this movement of performativity—description, explicitness, provocation, and simulacrum—and then explore them through a systematic review of 48 reviews of the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) for the period 1975 to 2019. We provide evidence for the performative role of literature reviewing in the CSR field through both re-presenting and intervening. We find that reviews performed the CSR literature and, accordingly, the field’s boundaries, categories, and priorities in a self-sustaining manner. By reflexively subjecting our own systematic review to the four performative problems we discuss, we also derive implications of performative analysis for the practice of literature reviewing. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428120935494 SN - 1094-4281 VL - 26 IS - 2 SP - 195 EP - 228 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Cavotta, Valeria A1 - Tirapani, Alessandro ED - Maak, Thomas ED - Pless, Nicola M. ED - Orlitzky, Marc ED - Sandhu, Sukhbir T1 - From explanation to outcome: The use of institutional theory in corporate responsibility research T2 - The Routledge Companion to Corporate Social Responsibility Y1 - 2021 SN - 9780367713096 PB - Routledge CY - London ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Mair, Johanna A1 - Kindt, Josefa A1 - Mena, Sébastien T1 - The Emerging Field of Political Innovation T2 - Stanford Social Innovation Review N2 - Civil society has attended to social problems for decades while intentionally refraining from overt engagement with politics. But a new field of practice seeks to reinvigorate democracy by emancipating social innovation from this stricture. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48558/R5XX-CP70 VL - 21 IS - 2 SP - 24 EP - 29 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pek, Simon A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Lyons, Brent T1 - The Role of Deliberative Mini-Publics in Improving the Deliberative Capacity of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives JF - Business Ethics Quarterly N2 - Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs)—private governance mechanisms involving firms, civil society organizations, and other actors deliberating to set rules, such as standards or codes of conduct, with which firms comply voluntarily—have become important tools for governing global business activities and the social and environmental consequences of these activities. Yet, this growth is paralleled with concerns about MSIs’ deliberative capacity, including the limited inclusion of some marginalized stakeholders, bias toward corporate interests, and, ultimately, ineffectiveness in their role as regulators. In this article, we conceptualize MSIs as deliberative systems to open the black box of the different elements that make up the MSI polity and better understand how their deliberative capacity hinges on problems in different elements. On the basis of this conceptualization, we examine how deliberative mini-publics—forums in which a randomly selected group of individuals from a particular population engage in learning and facilitated deliberations about a topic—can improve the deliberative capacity of MSIs. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2022.20 VL - 33 IS - 1 SP - 102 EP - 145 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Coraiola, Diego M. A1 - Foster, William M. A1 - Mena, Sébastien A1 - Foroughi, Hamid A1 - Rintamäki, Jukka T1 - Ecologies of Memories: Memory Work Within and Between Organizations and Communities JF - Academy of Management Annals N2 - In this paper, we review and synthesize the growing sociology-informed literature on organizational memory studies, which focuses on collective memory as a social construction of the past. To organize this literature, we present an ecological view of collective memory. Organizations, from this perspective, are conceived of as both constituted by a variety of mnemonic communities and, simultaneously, part of a broader ecology of mnemonic communities. We use this framework to guide our review of the various forms of memory work within and between mnemonic communities. Our review shows that much of the sociologically informed research has focused on memory work within communities. We also identify an emerging interest in the study of memory work between communities. In conclusion, we discuss possible future directions and outline a three-point agenda for future research that calls for a better understanding of the relational dynamics of memory with a focus on the organizing of memory, the embeddedness of memory work, and the construction of experiences of the past. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2021.0088 VL - 17 IS - 1 SP - 373 EP - 404 ER -