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Abstract

The increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events require organizations to effectively manage the threats these phenomena pose. To respond to these challenges, public agencies often turn to their organizational memories for guidance. Organizational memories support information processing capacity, facilitate sensemaking, and legitimize and speed up decision-making processes. While memories influence different aspects of organizational life, little is known about their antecedents and the mechanisms behind the retrieval of past events. This study contributes to the broader literature on organizational memory by investigating the elements shaping public agencies’ retrieval of extreme weather events. Integrating weather data from the National Center for Environmental Information's (NCEI) Storm Event Database with a national survey of the 300 largest transit agencies in the US, we find that public agency memories are influenced not only by the nature of the events experienced, but also by the processes that govern organizational attention, storage, and information processing.

Keywords

organizational memory extreme weather events information processing climate change

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Organizational Memories of Extreme Events: Evidence from U.S. Public Transit Agencies

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