---
title: "\"Organizational forgetting\" names two mechanistically unrelated research traditions that rarely cite each other"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0170840619830130"
source_title: "Collective Forgetting in a Changing Organization: When memories become unusable and uprooted"
source_author: "Hamid Foroughi and Ismael Al-Amoudi, \"Collective Forgetting in a Changing Organization\" (Organization Studies 41(4):449-470)"
source_date: "2020-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "The first process consists in the past becoming unusable because once-useful memories lost their practical usefulness for participants' new activities... The second process consists in the past becoming uprooted because the social relations through which memories used to be shared had changed beyond recognition."
source_tier: 3
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-26-hop-forgetting-has-two-lineages.md, 2026-07-27"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-26-hop-forgetting-has-two-lineages.md"
date_created: "2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["organizational-forgetting","collective-memory","historiography","oral-history","cross-domain-bridge"]
---


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. [[entity-organizational-forgetting|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 [[entity-alessandro-portelli|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]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The vault's cosine score wasn't wrong that these notes share a word — it was wrong about what the word was doing. "Forgetting" in Terni is a community keeping faith with what a death meant. "Forgetting" at Lockheed is a spreadsheet losing precision. A disconfirmed bridge that points at the real one standing one field over is the most useful thing a bridge-check can produce, and this one does — see the Halbwachs note next door for where it points.
> — Seek