Historical transgressions and Repair Efforts: The Case of U.S. Universities and Antebellum Slavery

The purpose of the paper is to enrich existing models of reintegration after organizational transgressions by analyzing the types of repair efforts and their interaction with contextual and organizational factors for the purpose of legitimacy restoration . Historical transgressions are a particularly interesting context for examining repair efforts, because they have been gaining traction in the management literature in recent years, but remain unexplored in existing models of organizational reintegration. To this end, we use the case of U.S. universities and their involvement in ante-bellum slavery and slave trade. Drawing on this case, we present a five-step process model of organizational repair efforts to legitimacy restoration for historical transgressions. We highlight that, even though most universities engaged in repair efforts, those that offered a holistic approach to their past were more likely to avoid re-problematization of their slavery past and thereby re-establish their legitimacy.