Remembering to Forget: The Historic Irresponsibility of U.S. Big Tobacco
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Remembering to Forget: The Historic Irresponsibility of U.S. Big Tobacco Diego M. Coraiola1 · Robbin Derry2 Received: 3 October 2018 / Accepted: 15 October 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Society increasingly demands corporations to be accountable for their past misbehaviours. Some corporations engage in forgetting work with the aim of avoiding responsibility for their wrongdoings. We argue that whenever social actors have their past actions called into question and engage in forgetting work, an ethics of remembering takes place. A collective project of social forgetting is contingent on the emergence of coordinated actions among players of an industry. Similarly, sustained efforts of forgetting work depend on the continuity of the project through various generations of employees, which presumes the existence of frameworks of remembering in place. We analysed this paradox through a historical case study of the U.S. tobacco industry. We conclude that forgetting work may be a double-edged sword. It might be beneficial in the short run, to the extent that corporations can successfully maintain the public ignorance about their deceitful pasts. In the long run, however, it creates additional layers of historical irresponsibility and may turn into a compounded liability in the event the memory of the collective strategy of social forgetting becomes public. Keywords Historic CSR · Organizational mnemonics · Tobacco industry It was life in the notebooks […] Big, black notebooks. They were three-ring binders, and they looked innocent enough, but those books… it was our Bible […] They were real. Everything was scripted. The script was etched in stone (Veritas talking about the tobacco industry’s strategy, as cited in Kessler 2001, p. xi).
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04323-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Diego M. Coraiola [email protected] Robbin Derry [email protected] 1
Augustana Campus, University of Alberta, Camrose, Canada
Dhillon School of Business, University of Lethbridge, Calgary, AB, Canada
2
Introduction Society is becoming more sensitive to and less tolerant of cases of corporate misbehaviour. This has been fueled by the emergence of a new consciousness about corporate social responsibility (CSR), the transparency revolution promoted by new technologies such as smart phones and the internet, and the successful mobilization of collective action against irresponsible corporate practices (Laszlo and Zhexembayeva 2011). At the same time, cases of corporate misbehaviour appear more frequently in the media, attract less global attention, and seem to be more quickly forgotten. Except for a few major events (e.g. Bhopal disaster, BP oil spill, Rana Plaza fire), many irresponsible acts do not become major media topics and remain unnoticed for the largest part of the population. In addition, the fragmented ownership structure of many corporations and t
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