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8
Organizational Forgetting, Nursing Knowledge, and Classification |
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IntroductionWell Do I Remember . . . |
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The last chapter looked at the ways in which NIC operated within multiple agendas through strategies for balanced tensions and strategically protecting ambiguities. Here we turn to the question of what happens when the system is used to encode and classify current and past knowledge and store it for the future. |
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Classification schemes always have the central task of providing access to the past. They are used to order archives, libraries, and the presentation of knowledge. Indeed, Auguste Comte argued that a good classification scheme could supplant the need for detailed history, since it could encode all valuable knowledge. Thus, classification schemes are used for various kinds of recall. Recall is in general a problematic concept, however, even when one can assume that people are trying to tell the truth about the past. Studies of people's intensely remembered "flashbulb memories" (What were you doing when Kennedy was assassinated?) have proved them to be often false (Brown and Kulik 1982). White House Counsel John Dean claimed fairly total recall at the time of Watergate. Ulric Neisser points out in his analysis of the tapes made in the Oval Office, however, that Dean remembered neither conversations nor even gists of conversations. Rather, Dean encoded an ideal set of possible conversations that embodied his perceived truth of the situation and his fantasies about his own role therein (Neisser 1982, see also the excellent critique in Edwards and Potter 1992
43). |
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People cannot generally remember accurately how they felt in the past. They take the present as a benchmark and then work from a currently held belief about change or stability in their attitudes. Thus, when asked how they felt six months ago about, say, a TV series, their |
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