Social and collective remembering in organizations

The concept of organizational memory usefully draws our attention to the practices and problems involved in preserving the past in the present. But it also suggests that we view memory as a static set of capacities shared across individuals and organizations. In contrast, I will present a social psychological view of memory which focuses on remembering as a communicative practice. Remembering is something which is jointly performed by persons, and mediated by objects, artefacts and place. Using a series of empirical examples, I will seek to demonstrate how this approach can reveal subtle interactional processes in which the past is subject to continuous reconstruction. Memory is not simply about preservation, it is the active invocation of a version of the past which occurs in the course of ongoing interaction in the present. We must then see the psychological dimensions of organizational behaviour as both performed-into-being through interaction and also as perpetually unfinished or open-ended.