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memories will necessarily be colored by what has happened since in that series (Linton 1982, Strauss 1959). It is hard to remember back past an act of infamy: my enemy today was always my enemy (I distrusted them when they appeared to be my friend, as I now recall). If on the other handas happens perhaps more often than inverselymy friend today was once an enemy, then I can tell you a conversion story that recasts their past, my past, or both. |
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If all history is in this sense history of the present, then one might surely think of memory as ineluctably a construction of the present. These studies from cognitive science and social psychology suggest that truth or falsity is not a simple concept when it comes to analyzing organizational memory in science or elsewhere (compare Hacking 1995: chapter 17 on the indeterminacy of the past). Thus Bannon and Kuutti (1996) stress that if "organizational memory" is at all a useful concept, it is so to the extent that it refers to active remembering that carries with it its own context. The memory comes in the form not of true or false facts but of multifaceted stories open to interpretation. |
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Neisser (1982), building on Tulving's distinction between episodic and semantic memory (remembering what versus remembering how) introduces a third kind of memory. Repisodic memory means remembering what was actually happening; by all accounts, including Neisser's own, this is an elusive positivist goal. |
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Against this increasing differentiation and specialization in the concept of memory, we find a single and undifferentiated definition of "forgetting." Forgetting is just "not remembering." Further, forgetting in all its guises has frequently been seen as necessarily a problem to be solved. Freud encouraged the recall of suppressed memories (see Hacking 1995 for a discussion of memory and veracity in Freud). Historians insist that we must learn the lessons of the past. Yrjö Engeström, in his paper on "organizational forgetting" (1990a) discusses problems raised by the ways in which doctors forget selectively and always linked with current exigencies. His activity theoretical perspective on the organic links between internal and external memory traces is particularly fruitful in that it provides a model for ethnographic studies of collective memory. But he still gives forgetting a negative spin. Bitner and Garfinkel (1967) are among the few to observe and describe a positive ecology of forgetting in their account of "good" organizational reasons for ''bad'' clinical records. Psychoanlysts do this as well to some degreeconcepts such as repression and denial sound more negative than they are technically. |
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