This 15-minute voiced presentation describes an ARC funded study that examined what motivated two multi-national extractive resource companies to commission public inquiries in response to a community-level grievance. Our findings highlight interplays between inquiry processes, individual and organisational dissonance, corporate grievance management, and organisational learning. We found that organisational identity threats, felt in the form of multi-layer organisational, individual, and conceptual dissonance, were vital to the commissioning of corporate inquiries. Rather than re-working of organisational identity, this disruption and unease prompted the inquiry and supported the maintenance of the companies’ valued identity attributes. Paradoxically, in undertaking the inquiry, an artifact remains – the public report, a trace that resists the kind of ‘forgetting’ that companies might otherwise use to curate their identity. We conclude that this public ‘remembering’ may advance the practice of human rights due diligence.

We thank Newmont Mining who was our ARC linkage partner on this grant.