Institutional trauma and collective memory in the welfare sector: A philo-sophical-sociological analysis of moral order and epistemic rupture

This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding how organizational crises and public scandals in the welfare sector generate institutional trauma and reorganize collective memory among employees. Drawing upon the author's philosophical sociology, the analysis conceptualizes welfare institutions not as neutral bureaucracies, but as moral fields structured by symbolic hierarchies, socially sustained epistemic orders and historically sedimented categories of moral judgment. Institutional trauma is understood not as an aggregation of individual psychological injuries but as a socially mediated epistemic rupture – a breakdown in the taken-for-granted frameworks that make professional action intelligible and morally justified. The article proposes a multidimensional theoretical synthesis combining Durkheim’s account of collective representations and anomie, Mannheim’s conception of socially situated knowledge, Bourdieu’s field theory and Collins’s model of interaction ritual chains, supplemented by insights from the sociology of cultural trauma (Sztompka, 2000) and social memory studies (Halbwachs, 1992; Olick & Robbins, 1998). Conceptually, it argues that crises in welfare institutions disrupt three interwoven orders: (1) the moral order regulating expectations of care and responsibility, (2) the epistemic order that defines what counts as valid professional knowledge, and (3) the mnemonic order through which institutions remember and narrate their past. Empirically oriented illustrations are drawn from a purposively selected corpus of staff testimonies, internal documents, and public representations from documented crises in European welfare institutions. These materials are treated not as a representative sample but as analytically constructed narratives that illuminate recurring patterns of moral breakdown, epistemic disorientation, and reconstructive rituals of repair. The article concludes that institutional trauma is best understood as a collective condition in which moral, cognitive and mnemonic orders are simultaneously shaken, and that welfare institutions “heal” themselves – if at all – by reshaping their symbolic boundaries and mnemonic practices rather than simply by implementing new procedures.