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machine that did something like that . . ." and so forth). We do not go into the preservation of nursing stories that Orr's work (Orr 1990, 1996) and others' assures us will be generated alongside of and as a complement to formal representations of nursing work. Further, new information infrastructures such as a hospital information system adopting NIC will in fact retain traces of organizational work and will despite themselves allow for the sharing of organizational memory. One might develop here the concept of organizational repression (by analogy to repressed memories). The argument comes down to asking not only what gets coded in but what gets read out of a given scheme; for example, who learns what from the fact that the coding book always falls open on a given page? (Compare Brown and Duguid 1994 on the importance of such peripheral clues.) |
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Just as oral history is a significant form of community memory, however, it is a different kind of memory (dates are far less important, stories migrate between characters, and so forth, see Vansina 1961) from that retained in the written record. This chapter has placed emphasis purely on the nature and articulation of what goes down in the continuing formal record that the organization preserves of its own past activity. This latter area is interesting in its own right because it is by using these memories that transportable formal accounts used in law, science, and management will be constructed. |
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Information, in Bateson's famous definition, is about differences that make a difference. Designers of classification schemes constantly have to decide what really does make a difference; along the way they develop an economy of knowledge that articulates clearance and erasure and ensures that all and only relevant features of the object (a disease, a body, a nursing intervention) being classified are remembered. In this case, the classification system can be incorporated into an information infrastructure that is delegated the role of paying due attention. A corollary of the "if it moves, count it" theory is the proposition "if you can't see it moving, forget it." The nurses we looked at tried to guarantee that they would not be forgotten (wiped from the record) by insisting that the information infrastructure pay due attention to their activities. |
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This chapter has argued that here may indeed be good organizational reasons for forgetting. It has also argued that the ways in which |
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