Ghosts of crisis past: Organizational memory longevity in Spanish Flu's effect on COVID-19 Responses

Abstract

Organizational learning research has found that organizations can learn from experience with negative events, like crises, to better prepare for and respond to similar events in the future. However, this prior work also suggests that organizational memory decays rapidly enough that experiences with long-past events should not have a significant impact on the response to a current organizational crisis. Moreover, extant organizational learning work views memories of past organizational experiences as being housed essentially entirely within the organization itself and has not explored the impacts of external memories of past organizational crises on current organizational actions. This paper reexamines the permanence of organizational memory of past crisis and the role of external memory repositories in crisis remembrance by integrating organizational learning theory with disaster memory theory. Based on this integration, we hypothesize that a past crisis can continue to impact current crisis mitigation efforts over very long periods of time—particularly when the past crisis was very acute—and that both internal and external collective memories of the crisis play a role in this impact. We test these hypotheses through an examination of the effect of U.S. states’ experiences with the 1918-1919 Spanish flu pandemic on state governments’ responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. We find strong support for our theory and hypotheses, suggesting that organizational and external disaster memories of long-past crises may play a significant, previously-untheorized role in organizational crisis mitigation efforts.