Organizational violence, memory and trauma

Trauma is a persistent form of memory and a response to organizational violence. Yet, research on traumatic memories has been absent from most management journals. In analyzing how organizations manage, interpret, and use the positive aspects of their past to achieve strategic goals, scholars have missed what they willfully forget. Studying organizational violence and trauma requires engaging with the communities and stakeholders affected by their actions. They are the memory keepers of the past that organizations often strive to suppress. Understanding the work of those mnemonic communities founded and transformed by organizational violence requires an analysis of how they construct that experience and negotiate it with perpetrators, cultivate traumatic memories across generations, and engage in processes of healing and reconciliation. Recognizing the memories and claims to the past that organizations attempt to erase can generate new avenues for research in organizational memory studies.