The Forgotten Function of Forgetting: Revisiting Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning

Blaschke, Steffen; Schoeneborn, Dennis

doi:10.1515/sosys-2006-0107

Cited by 18 publications

(31 citation statements)

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“…Memory typically fades over time both at the individual (Schacter, 2002) and collective (Schudson, 1995) levels. It is, in fact, forgetting, rather than remembering, that is the primary function of memory (Blaschke & Schoeneborn, 2006), given the vast number of events we encounter. Social memory studies suggest that passing time creates an emotional distance between a mnemonic community and past events.…”

Section: Collective Memory and Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Forgetting more than we remember is often useful. Selective forgetting can have positive consequences (Hedberg, 1981;Nystrom & Starbuck, 1984), since it helps mnemonic communities become sensitive to environmental changes and continue to evolve in response to their surroundings (Blaschke & Schoeneborn, 2006). Studies of organizational learning have similarly demonstrated that selective forgetting is crucial for sustained organizational life and continuity (Brown & Starkey, 2000;de Holan, 2011).…”

Section: Collective Memory and Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Forgetting of Corporate Irresponsibility

Mena

Rintamäki

Fleming

et al. 2016

AMR

141

183

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Why are some serious cases of corporate irresponsibility collectively forgotten? Drawing on social memory studies, we examine how this collective forgetting process can occur. We propose that a major instance of corporate irresponsibility leads to the emergence of a stakeholder mnemonic community that shares a common recollection of the past incident. This community generates and then draws on mnemonic traces to sustain a collective memory of the past event over time. In addition to the natural entropic tendency to forget, collective memory is also undermined by instrumental "forgetting work," which we conceptualize in this article. Forgetting work involves manipulating short-term conditions of the event, silencing vocal "rememberers," and undermining collective mnemonic traces that sustain a version of the past. This process can result in a reconfigured collective memory and collective forgetting of corporate irresponsibility events. Collective forgetting can have positive and negative consequences for the firm, stakeholders, and society.

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Section: Collective Memory and Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Collective Memory and Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Forgetting of Corporate Irresponsibility

Mena

Rintamäki

Fleming

et al. 2016

AMR

141

183

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The costs and efforts involved in storing and copying information are low (Whelan and Teigland, 2013 ). Organizational processes such as “Exploration and Exploitation” (March, 1991 ), which describes the search, acquisition and elaboration of new information, the intensive and excessive use of information, and the evaluation of information as an important resource, have led to a continuous increase in available and recallable stored knowledge (Blaschke and Schoeneborn, 2006 ; Miller and Martignoni, 2016 ).…”

Section: Organizational Learning and The Supplemental Need For Forgetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intentional Forgetting in Organizations: The Importance of Eliminating Retrieval Cues for Implementing New Routines

Kluge

Gronau

2018

Front. Psychol.

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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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“…Despite incorporating different assumptions about the learning mechanism and social network structure, these models all share the implicit assumption that agents never forget. Blaschke and Schoeneborn (2006) provide the sole exception. Adding forgetting produces results that differ from the established negative relation between the learning rate and long-run average knowledge (see Figure 3(a) and (b)).…”

Section: Research Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizational learning with forgetting: Reconsidering the exploration–exploitation tradeoff

Miller

Martignoni

2015

Strategic Organization

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Prior exploration-exploitation models of organizational learning generally neglect forgetting. This study models organizational learning with forgetting and derives some novel implications. Most noteworthy, our findings point out limits to the contention that promoting rapid learning undermines long-run knowledge. Slower learning is not always better. When agents are subject to forgetting, raising the rate of interpersonal learning often enhances the diversity of beliefs within an organization, as well as the number and range of aspects of the environment that organizational members come to know. The rate of learning that maximizes organizational knowledge or diversity varies with the rate of forgetting. Organizations need not sacrifice diversity as they gain knowledge. Analyses of our model indicate that knowledge and diversity are positively correlated across organizations. Implications of forgetting redirect theorists, empirical researchers, and managers toward alternatives to some conclusions from prior exploration-exploitation modeling studies.

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The Forgotten Function of Forgetting: Revisiting Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

On the Forgetting of Corporate Irresponsibility

On the Forgetting of Corporate Irresponsibility

Intentional Forgetting in Organizations: The Importance of Eliminating Retrieval Cues for Implementing New Routines

Organizational learning with forgetting: Reconsidering the exploration–exploitation tradeoff

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