Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 22, 2011

Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting

The BP Oil Disaster
Critical Insights and Lessons for Management and Organizational Reputation

This paper develops a two-part model of the crucial roles that episodic memory and perceptual filters play in responses to organizational crisis. We examine the cascading impacts of episodic memory, the types of filters that shape stakeholder responses to crisis, and subsequent impacts on reputation. A sound wave analogy is developed to understand the complexity of organizational crisis. The model is partially applied to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster.