Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Big data, algorithmic decision-making, and artificial intelligence (AI) are among the technological advances with capabilities surpassing humans in speed, reach, and retention. Not unlike other technological advancements, the potential and real impact of such emerging technologies is met with praise, optimism, fear, alarm, caution, adaptation, and resistance. The recent proliferation of generative AI tools, however, has implied a radical expansion of what such non-human technologies can achieve. Debates are particularly heated in speculating what would happen to the concepts, activities, or characteristics long believed to be exclusively human endeavours (e.g., Kulkarni et al., 2024; Lindebaum et al., 2024).
 
Amongst such concepts are collective memory and memory work in and around organizations. Collective memory is generally understood as a socially-mediated, socially-constructed version of the past, with practices around it referred to as memory work (Coraiola et al., 2023). Given the established role of materiality in memory work (e.g., Blagoev et al., 2018; Sadeghi, 2024), the impact of technology on collective memory is already tangible. AI, for instance, can aid in preserving and recalling human creations, stories, and events, past and present, with unprecedented ease. The constant transfiguration of such technologies, their ostensible comprehensiveness, their immense reach, and often untraceable editability pose several unprecedented questions (Kallinikos et al., 2013; Omidvar et al., 2023), including those below.
 
Notably, the sheer capacity of storage, speed of retrieval, and accessibility of technology can ostensibly expand what, when, and how we remember, albeit with unprecedented outcomes. For instance, technology is capable of (re)creating lost images, weaving stories from fragmented memories. And yet, such ubiquity of records and production carries the risk of equating memories with records. It is also essential to explore whether and under which conditions emerging technologies can benefit or harm memory work, collective memories, and temporality (e.g., Sadeghi, 2024; Omidvar et al., 2025; Zundel et al., 2023). Moreover, that the social relations are increasingly mediated by technology will undoubtedly have an impact on memory work, since the latter is decidedly social (e.g., Pilkington, 2024). The limits, conditions, and considerations under which technology and memory can intermingle are yet to be fully unraveled.
 
Another area ripe with opportunities and risks is how collective memory relates to culture and cultural production. The relation between cultural production and memory is particularly important, since memory and culture are entangled in myriad, mutually reinforcing ways. Technology, for instance, influences culture, individuals involved in cultural production, and how they cohere around collective memories (e.g., Foroughi et al., 2024). Yet, while infinite storage and processing capacity tempt individuals to reduce culture and memory to mere relics (Deal et al., 2021), without the social fabric, the substantial role of collective memory in culture is likely to become less consequential, posing existential threats to some communities.
 
Relatedly, the questions on authenticity, bias, and purpose are relevant. Cultural artefacts, including music, dance, and paintings, have long been recognized as embodying and strengthening collective memories (Confino, 1997; Till, 2008). The outputs of emerging technologies, particularly generative AI, draw on a vast resource and mimic human-like behavior, reshaping the creation, preservation, and sharing of cultural artefacts. While pondering the authenticity of reproduced cultural products is not recent (e.g., Benjamin, 1935), emerging technologies have profoundly challenged traditional notions of authorship and originality. Some are optimists, while others vehemently oppose such uses as ontologically contradictory to the production of cultural artefacts and knowledge, including writing (e.g., Kulkarni et al., 2024; Lindebaum & Fleming, 2024). Sorting perceived risks from imagined benefits is foundational to understanding how memory work can endure through culture.
 
Furthermore, emerging technologies are interwoven with memory, carrying significant cultural, political, and ethical implications. With various technologies continuing to capture the past, even if accidental or so-called natural forgetting happens, it can be quickly compensated for by technological means. Memory places (Nora, 1989), for instance, have expanded to the digital space, both in terms of capacity to capture the past, as well as in creating new virtual spaces for collective remembering with particular cultural significance for some social groups. Digging through the archives to remember the truth is another possible activity, evident in contemporary protests, grassroots movements, and justice-seeking (e.g., Birkner & Donk, 2020).
 
By the same token, as emerging technologies facilitate recording and accessing the past (cf., Hatch & Schultz, 2017), the previous balance of remembering and forgetting that inheres in memory work also shifts in favour of remembering. The ethics of preserving, sharing, forgetting, or remembering with such unprecedented access, thus, require further investigation (e.g., Decker et al., 2022). Namely, internet users find it increasingly difficult to erase traces of their past life from the internet, fueling the debates on the ‘right to be forgotten’ (Ghezzi et al., 2014). Similarly, the ways in which scholars and practitioners understand memory work in and around organizations are bound to be transformed in several possible directions. This can be for good, but it also has potential for misuse. If we take the presence of the past for granted, some entities can erase the traces of the past to change narratives or whitewash the past. Continuing the conversation on the ethics of memory work in recording, remembering, forgetting, or representing the past for the present and future societies is, thus, all the more vital.
 
In this sub-theme, we invite theoretical or empirical submissions that explore the junction of memories, technology, and the ways they relate to cultural productions from diverse perspectives. We particularly welcome submissions that explore the cross-fertilization of these fields, offering insights into how digital technologies and, particularly, AI-driven transformations are (re)shaping culture, cultural production, memory, their interplay, and eventual meaning for the societies of the future. By understanding these dynamics, we can better navigate the implications of currently emerging technologies for the diversity and richness of future beings. Possible questions include (but are not limited to):

• What epistemological and ontological issues exist around collective memories in the age of AI?

• How can/does organizational memory work appear in the age of AI?

• How do emerging technologies transform the intersection of culture and memory?

• What are the politico-ethical implications of the pervasiveness of AI in memory work?

• How do algorithms shape remembering, forgetting, and representing the past?

• How do emerging technologies impact the epistemology of memory?

• What will authenticity and accuracy mean in technologically-assisted cultural production? How does it translate to collective memories?

• How do emerging technologies implicate ideas such as authorship, ownership, and rights?

• How can technology assist in supporting, contesting, or recreating collective memories?

• What is the relationship between technology-mediated memory work and wrongdoing, whitewashing, and irresponsibility?

• How are different communities (ethnic, regional, geographical, marginal, etc.) impacted differently by technology-assisted memory work?

• Which new markets and/or occupations are likely to emerge around memory and cultural production, and what is their relationship to legacy systems?

References

• Benjamin, W. (1935): The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

• Birkner, T., & Donk, A. (2020): “Collective memory and social media: Fostering a new historical consciousness in the digital age?” Memory Studies, 13 (4), 367–383.

• Blagoev, B., Felten, S., & Kahn, R. (2018): “The career of a catalogue: Organizational memory, materiality and the dual nature of the past at the British Museum (1970–today).” Organization Studies, 39 (12), 1757–1783.

• Confino, A. (1997): “Collective memory and cultural history: Problems of method.” The American Historical Review, 102 (5), 1386–1403.

• Coraiola, D.M., Foster, W.M., Mena, S., Foroughi, H., & Rintamäki, J. (2023): “Ecologies of memories: Memory work within and between organizations and communities.” Academy of Management Annals, 17(1), 373–404.

• Deal, N.M., Novicevic, M.M., Mills, A.J., Lugar, C.W., & Roberts, F. (2021): “Taking an eventful historic turn down the cultural memory lane.” Journal of Management History, 27 (1), 61–79.

• Decker, S., Kirsch, D.A., Kuppili Venkata, S., & Nix, A. (2022): “Finding light in dark archives: Using AI to connect context and content in email.” AI and Society, 37 (3), 859–872.

• Foroughi, H., Eisenman, M., & Parsley, S. (2024): “Old Skool Spinning and Syncing: Memory, Technologies, and Occupational Membership in a DJ Community.” Journal of Management Studies, first published online on May 21, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13086

• Ghezzi, A., Guimarães Pereira, Â., & Vesnić-Alujević, L. (eds.) (2014): The Ethics of Memory in a Digital Age: Interrogating the Right to Be Forgotten. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Hatch, M.J., & Schultz, M. (2017): “Toward a theory of using history authentically: Historicizing in the Carlsberg Group.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 62 (4), 657–697.

• Kallinikos, J., Aaltonen, A., & Marton, A. (2013): “The ambivalent ontology of digital artifacts.” MIS Quarterly, 37 (2), 357–370.

• Kulkarni, M., Mantere, S., Vaara, E., van den Broek, E., Pachidi, S., Glaser, V.L., Gehman, J., Petriglieri, G., Lindebaum, D., Cameron, L.D., Rahman, H. A., Islam, G., & Greenwood, M. (2024): “The Future of Research in an Artificial Intelligence-Driven World.” Journal of Management Inquiry, 33 (3), 207–229.

• Lindebaum, D., & Fleming, P. (2024): “ChatGPT undermines human reflexivity, scientific responsibility, and responsible management research.” British Journal of Management, 35 (2), 566–575.

• Lindebaum, D., Moser, C., & Islam, G. (2024): “Big data, proxies, algorithmic decision‐making and the future of management theory.” Journal of Management Studies, 61 (6), 2724–2747.

• Nora, P. (1989): “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, 26 (1), 7–24.

• Omidvar, O., Safavi, M., & Glaser, V. L. (2023). Algorithmic Routines and dynamic inertia: How organizations avoid adapting to changes in the environment. Journal of Management Studies, 60(2), 313–345. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12819

  Omidvar, O., Hadjimichael, D., Burke, G. T., Pyrko, I., & Chia, R. (2025). Temporal patterns in management: integrating perspectives on rhythms of work and organizing. Academy of Management Annals, 19(2), 861-902. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2024.0081

• Pilkington, D. (2024): “Myopic memory: Capitalism’s new continuity in the age of AI.” Memory, Mind & Media, 3, e24, https://doi.org/10.1017/mem.2024.21

• Sadeghi, Y. (2024): “‘From the Ivory Tower’? Memory Workers and Mnemonic Practices in Communities.” Journal of Management Studies, first published online August 25, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13135

• Till, K.E. (2008): “Artistic and activist memory-work: Approaching place-based practice.” Memory Studies, 1(1), 99–113.

• Zundel, M., Horner, S., & Foster, W.M. (2023): “Organizational Memory as Technology.” In: F.-X. de Vaujany, R. Holt, & A. Grandazzi (eds.): Organization as Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 375–396.