How Institutional Scarring Shapes Legal Consciousness: The Rise of Local Government Litigation Against Opioid Manufacturers
14 Nov 2024
12:30 -14:00
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Room W2.01 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Strategy and International Business seminar
Speaker: Dr Amanda Sharkey, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame
About the seminar topic
Between 2017 and 2020, US local government attorneys filed a surge of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors and retailers. These affirmative lawsuits, aimed at recovering costs incurred due to the opioid epidemic, represented a drastic departure from these attorneys’ usual defensive role. Adopting this novel organisational practice necessitated a tectonic shift in how local government attorneys viewed the relationship between their professional roles and the law itself – their legal consciousness.
To understand how this change occurred, we adopt a mixed-methods approach that includes interviews as well as event-history analyses of lawsuits. Our investigation reveals the importance of institutional scarring, a distinct form of organisational learning wherein an organisation develops a lingering sense of having been wronged by another institution.
Scarring, which occurred in this case due to the perceived insufficient and inappropriate distribution of Big Tobacco settlement monies by state governments decades earlier, prompted a shift in attorneys’ legal consciousness when the possibility of opioid litigation arose, and this change ultimately underpinned the decision to file suits. Our findings not only shed light on a rare but growing tactic used by local governments to respond to public health crises, but also inform the literatures on legal consciousness, diffusion, and organisational learning.
Speaker bio
Amanda J. Sharkey is an Associate Professor of Management & Organisation in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. She is an organisational theorist and economic sociologist who studies how social and cultural factors impact organisational behaviours and firm performance. She is particularly interested in questions related to how information intermediaries, such as ratings and rankings, affect firms’ status and reputation in markets, thereby shaping organisational behaviours and outcomes.
Her research has appeared in the Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, the Strategic Management Journal, the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Organisation Science and Sociological Methods and Research. She is currently an Associate Editor at the Administrative Science Quarterly. Prior to joining Notre Dame, Amanda was an associate professor in the business schools at the University of Chicago and at Arizona State University. She received her doctorate in sociology at Stanford University in 2011, completed a master’s degree in social research methods from the London School of Economics in 2004 and earned her bachelor’s degree in economics and journalism from Northwestern University in 1999. Before entering academia, she worked in management consulting.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.