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tional arrangements do bear traces of their past, for example, in the case of an outmoded classification system being reflected in the arrangements of artifacts in a museum. In the long term, however, by the time that the curricula have been redesigned, the manuals rewritten, and new nursing information systems produced, it can become a highly effective tool. Clearance is a pragmatic strategy. It may well be the case that a given organizational routine or piece of knowledge has roots in the distant past. At the same time, it may also be the case that in dealing with said routine or knowledge it is easier to act as if it had just arrived on the scene. For this reason the issue of truth or falsity of memory can be a red herring in treatments of organizational memory as well as analytically undecidable: a false memory, well constructed through a program of forgetting, can be of great use. |
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Erasure is a key dimension of classification work in all organizations. There is a famous passage in the Sherlock Holmes stories where Watson informs Holmes that the earth circles the sun; Holmes politely thanks Watson and then remarks that he will try to forget this fact as soon as possible, since it is a kind of fact that cannot possibly be relevant to the task that is at hand for him: the solution of a crime. In scientific organizations, things get deliberately forgotten in a variety of ways. Scientists classify away traces that they know to be relevant but which should not be officially recorded. For example, when looking at the early archives of the Schlumberger Company, Bowker was struck by a change in the written traces being left of company activity (1994). In the early days the boxes contained a series of highly detailed reports of daily activity sent by engineers in the field across the world to the company's center of calculation in Paris, to borrow Callon's felicitous phrase (Callon 1986). The theory, explicitly stated, was that the company needed the best possible records of what went on in the field to build up a sufficiently large database so as to construct scientific knowledge. It needed this as well to coordinate strategies for the insertion of the company into the oil field environment. |
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Then one day things changed. Detailed accounts in French of work practice became sketchy tables in English of numbers of oil wells logged. What had happened? The company had gotten involved in a legal suit with Halliburton and had come to realize that its own internal traces of activity were open to potential scrutiny by U.S. courts determining patent claims. There were two simultaneous realizations: first the records should be in English, since the French language could be read by a southern court as a foreign code. Second, the records should |
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