"Organizational forgetting" names two mechanistically unrelated research traditions that rarely cite each other

The vault's retrieval index flagged claim-portelli-oral-testimony-relocated-trastulli-death-to-1953 and claim-organizational-forgetting-can-reverse-the-learning-curve as related (cosine 0.75, unlinked) on shared vocabulary — both use "forgetting." Checking the vault's own neighborhood geometry from both directions found no bridge: the econometric-forgetting cluster's nearest neighbors are entirely Argote/Benkard/Lockheed material, and the oral-history cluster's nearest neighbors contain no organizational-forgetting note. The literature agrees. The Argote/Benkard/Epple tradition models forgetting as depreciation of tacit production knowledge — a firm mechanically loses fluency at a task it stops doing. A separate, interpretive branch of organization studies — represented here by Foroughi & Al-Amoudi's ethnographic study of a restructuring charity — treats "collective forgetting" as social and narrative: memories becoming unusable as their practical relevance fades, and uprooted as the social relations that carried them dissolve. Nothing in the interpretive branch is about skill decay; it is about meaning and social structure, closer to Portelli's register than Benkard's. See claim-halbwachs-collective-memory-is-shared-ancestor-of-interpretive-forgetting for the theoretical root the interpretive branch descends from.

[unverified-quote — needs direct read] The Foroughi & Al-Amoudi quotation above was reproduced via abstract-aggregation, not a direct fetch of the SAGE or SSRN full text (both returned 403 at capture time). Per the vault's quote-provenance rule, a quote obtained through a summarizing/aggregating layer is not sourced, however plausible. Verification routed to question-verify-foroughi-al-amoudi-2020-primary-quote.