Abstract
In an era of reputational capitalism and digital governance, organizations do not merely remember the past — they curate and strategically forget it. While prior scholarship foregrounds apology, restitution, and transparency as modes of moral repair, this paper reframes forgetting as an active, power-laden process shaped by institutional authority, narrative governance, and digital infrastructures. We introduce two constructs: strategic forgetting, the deliberate erasure or silencing of contested histories to preserve legitimacy; and ethical paramnesia, the performative misremembering of wrongdoing that simulates accountability while displacing responsibility. Drawing on memory studies, organizational ethics, and digital sociology, we demonstrate how digital mnemotechnologies amplify organizations’ capacity to shape collective memory under reputational threat. We advance a critical ethics of mnemonic justice, grounded in epistemic transparency, moral reflexivity, and distributive responsibility, to guide ethically accountable engagement with contested pasts.