Remembrance of Things Past? The Dynamics of Organizational Forgetting

Holan, Pablo Martin de; Phillips, Nelson

doi:10.1287/mnsc.1040.0273

Cited by 395 publications

(250 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…As with Tsang and Zahra (2008), the assumption here is that unlearning is a conscious and intentional process and as such is distinct from forgetting. De Holan and Phillips (2004;, agree about the deliberate nature of unlearning, although they do not distinguish in the same way as others between forgetting and unlearning. Recently there have been a significant number of articles and book chapters on the topic of organizational level forgetting (see for example Casey and Olivera 2011;De Holan and Phillips 2011;EasterbySmith and Lyles 2011;De Holan 2011b).…”

Section: Clarifying and Developing The Unlearning Conceptmentioning

confidence: 92%

The process of individual unlearning: A neglected topic in an under-researched field

Hislop

Bosley

Coombs

et al. 2013

Management Learning

136

249

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In a contemporary business environment where change is often regarded as continuous, the ability of people or organizations to be able to successfully adapt and respond to change is key. Change often involves not only the learning of new behaviours, ideas, or practices but also giving up or abandoning some established ones. Despite both these elements generally being important to change, academic focus on processes of abandoning or giving up established knowledge and practices, that is, unlearning, is lacking. This conceptual article draws on a range of literature to suggest that the process of individual unlearning may have particular features. The review defines the concept of unlearning, differentiates between two different types of individual unlearning, and suggests that each type of individual unlearning may have its own distinctive features and dynamics. This article builds from this insight through developing a typology, which distinguishes between four types of individual unlearning. It concludes with an agenda for future empirical research to examine and validate the concepts presented.

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Section: Clarifying and Developing The Unlearning Conceptmentioning

confidence: 92%

The process of individual unlearning: A neglected topic in an under-researched field

Hislop

Bosley

Coombs

et al. 2013

Management Learning

136

249

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…As illustrations, past scholarship has emphasized the importance of considering organizational "biographies" (Kimberly, 1987) or "nostalgia" (Brown & Humphreys, 2002) when analyzing organizations. Yet these and other studies typically rely primarily on a set of individual interviews conducted over a short period of time to study history (for other examples see Biggart (1977), de Holan andPhillips (2004) and Kimberly and Bouchikhi (1995)). In that respect, the observation that "collective memory lacks solid empirical footings" (Glynn, 1997: 147) in organization studies still holds true today.…”

Section: Collective Memory and Identity Endurancementioning

confidence: 99%

Collective Memory Meets Organizational Identity: Remembering to Forget in a Firm's Rhetorical History

Anteby

Molnár

2012

AMJ

252

321

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Much organizational identity research has grappled with the question of identity emergence or change. Yet the question of identity endurance is equally puzzling. Relying primarily on the analysis of 309 internal bulletins produced at a French aeronautics firm over almost fifty years, we theorize a link between collective memory and organizational identity endurance. More specifically, we show how forgetting in a firm's ongoing rhetorical history-here, the bulletins' repeated omission of contradictory elements in the firm's past (i.e., structural omission) or attempts to neutralize them with valued identity cues (i.e., preemptive neutralization)-sustains its identity. Thus knowing "who we are" might depend in part on repeatedly remembering to forget "who we were not."In press: Academy of Management Journal (Non-edited version) *Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Michael Pratt and the three anonymous AMJ reviewers for their guidance on this article as well as to Elena Corsi, Marina Dal Soglio, Vincent Dessain, and Kathleen Ryan for their assistance in data collection. We also thank

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“…taking the left instead of the right exit at the station, etc.). The question is if we should use unlearning for the two notions of knowledge interchangeably given there is a lot of confusion regarding the terms in both theory and practice [47]. Rather, it may be better to first see what we would need unlearning for in order to then clarify which level we should consider.…”

Section: Issue 3: What Should Be Unlearnt?mentioning

confidence: 99%