In response to the impending spread of COVID-19, universities worldwide abruptly stopped face-to-face teaching and switched to technology-mediated teaching. As a result, the use of technology in the learning processes of students of different disciplines became essential and the only way to teach, communicate and collaborate for months. In this crisis context, we conducted a longitudinal study in four German universities, in which we collected a total of 875 responses from students of information systems and music and arts at four points in time during the spring–summer 2020 semester. Our study focused on (1) the students’ acceptance of technology-mediated learning, (2) any change in this acceptance during the semester and (3) the differences in acceptance between the two disciplines. We applied the Technology Acceptance Model and were able to validate it for the extreme situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. We extended the model with three new variables (time flexibility, learning flexibility and social isolation) that influenced the construct of perceived usefulness. Furthermore, we detected differences between the disciplines and over time. In this paper, we present and discuss our study’s results and derive short- and long-term implications for science and practice.

To cope with the already large, and ever increasing, amount of information stored in organizational memory, “forgetting,” as an important human memory process, might be transferred to the organizational context. Especially in intentionally planned change processes (e.g., change management), forgetting is an important precondition to impede the recall of obsolete routines and adapt to new strategic objectives accompanied by new organizational routines. We first comprehensively review the literature on the need for organizational forgetting and particularly on accidental vs. intentional forgetting. We discuss the current state of the art of theory and empirical evidence on forgetting from cognitive psychology in order to infer mechanisms applicable to the organizational context. In this respect, we emphasize retrieval theories and the relevance of retrieval cues important for forgetting. Subsequently, we transfer the empirical evidence that the elimination of retrieval cues leads to faster forgetting to the forgetting of organizational routines, as routines are part of organizational memory. We then propose a classification of cues (context, sensory, business process-related cues) that are relevant in the forgetting of routines, and discuss a meta-cue called the “situational strength” cue, which is relevant if cues of an old and a new routine are present simultaneously. Based on the classification as business process-related cues (information, team, task, object cues), we propose mechanisms to accelerate forgetting by eliminating specific cues based on the empirical and theoretical state of the art. We conclude that in intentional organizational change processes, the elimination of cues to accelerate forgetting should be used in change management practices.

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Purpose Insight has grown that for an organization to learn and change successfully, forgetting and unlearning are required. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the relevant existing body of empirical research on forgetting and unlearning, to encourage research using a greater variety of methods and to contribute to a more complementary body of empirical work by using designs and instruments with a stronger reference to previous studies. Design/methodology/approach As the number of theoretical papers clearly exceeds the number of empirical papers, the present paper deals with the main insights based on the empirical state of research on unlearning and forgetting. So far, these empirical results have shown relationships between unlearning and other organizational outcomes such as innovation on an organizational level, but many of the other proposed relationships have not been investigated. The authors presents suggestion to apply a larger variety of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods in organizational research. Findings Unlearning and forgetting research can benefit both from more diverse theoretical questions addressed in research and from a more complementary body of empirical work that applies methods, designs and instruments that refer to previous research designs and results. To understand and manage unlearning and forgetting, empirical work should relate to and expand upon previous empirical work to form a more coherent understanding of empirical results. Originality/value The paper presents a variety of research designs and methods that can be applied within the research context of understanding the nature of organizational forgetting and unlearning. Additionally, it illustrates the potential for different methods, such as experience sampling methods, which capture the temporal aspects of forgetting and unlearning.