Celebrating Success: Dr Victoria Pagan

Congratulations to Dr Victoria Pagan for their paper ‘The murder of knowledge and the ghosts that remain: Non-disclosure agreements and their effects’ which has recently been accepted for publication in Culture and Organization.

Abstract: This paper conceptualizes the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as a weapon of epistemic violence to kill the victims’ knowledge of instances of misconduct and discrimination in organizations. It is proposed that the death of this knowledge is not absolute, it becomes a ghostly presence that both haunts the victim and enables the victim to reclaim some epistemic justice by becoming a haunter, warning others of the threats that survive them. This paper proposes new links in relation to the social and symbolic use of NDAs to help us understand the imperfect suppression and privileging of knowledge in organizations. The ghostly is a conceptual tool to enable symbolic analysis of the practices involved in and resulting from the implementation of NDAs.