SBA faculty member receives Emerald Literati Award

Dr. Stefania Mariano, Associate Professor in Management at American University of Sharjah (AUS), recently received an Outstanding Paper Award from the Emerald Literati Awards for her collaborative research on organizational “forgetting.”

Presented by Emerald Publishing, the Emerald Literati Awards celebrate and reward outstanding contributions of authors and reviewers to global knowledge. It recognizes high-quality scholarly research from around the world.

The winning paper, titled “Organizational Forgetting Part I: A Review of the Literature and Future Research Directions” was a collaboration with Andrea Casey, Associate Professor at George Washington University, USA, and Fernando Olivera, Associate Professor at Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario, Canada.

“The paper systematically reviews and synthesizes the literature on organizational forgetting, which is the loss of organizational knowledge at any level. We continuously speak about the importance of organizational learning and its impact on organizational knowledge. However, organizational forgetting is just as important; if not managed properly, it may determine the loss of crucial organizational knowledge,” said Dr. Mariano.

Published in The Learning Organization journal, the review and synthesis of the literature on organizational forgetting showed that literature on organizational forgetting is fragmented, with studies conducted across disparate fields and using different methodologies with a focus on three areas: knowledge depreciation, knowledge loss and unlearning.

“This paper is part of a two-phase research offering an integrative view of organizational forgetting that proposes two broad areas for future research—one that that addresses integrative theoretical challenges that include issues of temporality, history, power dynamics and organizational context. A second area highlights a need to reconcile contradicting explanations—such as whether technological sophistication and codification practices or social networks prevent knowledge depreciation and loss— through a multilevel perspective,” she said.

Dr. Mariano is also working on several projects connected to organizational forgetting and organizational mnemonics, or memory devices. 

QS World University Subject Rankings has named AUS among the top four in the Middle East for business and management studies (2021). The School of Business Administration’s recognized Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) program offers students the opportunity to choose from six majors (accounting, economics, finance, marketing, management and management information systems) and a variety of minors. For more information, visit www.aus.edu/sba.