TY  - JOUR
T1  - How Institutionalized Agility Produces Organizational Forgetting and Memory Erosion
A1  - Lukas Weber
A1  - Sophie Janssen
A1  - Jonas Richter
A1  - Elena Fischer
JF  - Journal of Applied Organizational Systems and Behavior
JO  - J Appl Organ Syst Behav
SN  - 3108-852X
Y1  - 2023
VL  - 3
IS  - 2
DO  - 10.51847/mH0mNrjSVj
SP  - 84
EP  - 92
N2  - Agility is commonly presented as an organizational capacity for sensing change, reallocating resources, and reconfiguring work. Yet when recurrent transformation becomes an institutionalized expectation rather than a bounded response, renewal may weaken the organizational conditions through which prior knowledge remains retrievable, interpretable, and transferable. This original conceptual theory article examines how agility may generate organizational forgetting and memory erosion without assuming that agility, change, or unlearning is inherently dysfunctional. It integrates scholarship on organizational agility, intentional and collective forgetting, unlearning, reinvention, personnel transitions, knowledge loss, intergenerational transfer, and knowledge hiding. The article proposes the Theory of Agility-Induced Forgetting, a conditional process account in which institutionalized renewal pressures may produce temporal compression, personnel fluidity, repeated displacement of routines, and devaluation of prior knowledge. These pressures are proposed to erode memory when they interrupt retrieval cues, handoffs, contextual documentation, provenance, rationale, and distributed knowledge of who knows what. The theory distinguishes adaptive, deliberate unlearning from unintended degradation and treats organizational memory as socially and materially enacted rather than merely stored. It develops propositions and memory-preserving design principles concerning retention decisions, transition interfaces, documentation stewardship, and distributed expertise. The proposed relationships remain conceptually plausible rather than empirically validated. Their relevance is expected to depend on knowledge tacitness, task interdependence, turnover, documentation capacity, trust, occupational identity, and safety or accountability demands. The contribution is a bounded explanation of when institutionalized agility may narrow, rather than expand, an organization’s adaptive range.
UR  - https://apsshs.com/article/how-institutionalized-agility-produces-organizational-forgetting-and-memory-erosion-cxaaffiztp91he3
ER  -