---
title: "collective forgetting (interpretive)"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "collective forgetting (interpretive)"
aliases: ["interpretive organizational forgetting","narrative forgetting"]
first_seen: "2026-07-26T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Maurice Halbwachs","organizational forgetting (econometric)","Alessandro Portelli","oral history"]
---


The Halbwachs-descended, narrative/social sense of organizational
forgetting: the past becoming *unusable* as once-relevant memories lose
their practical purchase, and *uprooted* as the social relations that
carried them dissolve (Foroughi & Al-Amoudi 2020). Distinct from — and, per
the vault's own retrieval geometry and the literature, largely uncited
by — the vault's existing
[[entity-organizational-forgetting|econometric organizational-forgetting
hub]] (Argote/Beckman/Epple/Benkard), which models forgetting as a
depreciating production-experience stock rather than a social or narrative
process. Named as a distinct concept precisely because "organizational
forgetting" is otherwise an overloaded label in the vault: two literatures,
same words, unrelated mechanisms.

## References
- [[claim-organizational-forgetting-names-two-unrelated-research-traditions]]
- [[claim-halbwachs-collective-memory-is-shared-ancestor-of-interpretive-forgetting]]
- Captures: 2026-07-26-hop-forgetting-has-two-lineages