Abstract
How organizations handle the death of a member has received little attention in organization studies. Given death is a universal experience and how it is handled can reflect the humanity and care in organizational life, and in the shadow of pandemic trauma that has heightened our attention, the time is right to focus on this issue. Accordingly, we develop a theoretical argument that describes how handling death in an organization involves the duality of remembrance and forgetting. One approach is to focus on forgetting through separation from the (traces of the) deceased. The other is to seek to integrate such traces within the organization through acts of remembrance and commemoration. Building on interdisciplinary insights, we explain how remembering and forgetting the dead in organizations involves four overlapping elements, namely innovation, disintegration, tradition and conservation. This characterisation is established to support further work that considers how the balance of elements changes over time, and how the elements may inter-relate and inform each other.