Abstract
Why does so much literature on unlearning ignore the people who do the unlearning? What would we understand differently if we focused on those people? Much of the existing literature argues that unlearning can only be achieved, and new knowledge acquired, if old knowledge is discarded: the clean slate approach. This might be a reasonable way of organising stock in a warehouse, where room needs to be created for new deliveries, but it is not an accurate description of a human system. This article draws on a detailed qualitative study of learning in the UK Fire and Rescue Service to challenge the clean slate approach and demonstrate that, not only did firefighters retain their old knowledge, they used it as a benchmark to assess new routines and practices. This meant that firefighters’ trust in, and consent to, innovation was key to successful implementation. In order to understand the social aspects of unlearning, this research focuses on the people involved as active agents, rather than passive recipients or discarders of knowledge.
Highlights
The creation, capture and transfer of knowledge has long been a focus of the knowledge management literature
Most ignore the inconvenient fact that it is the people, who work in organisations, to whom the task of learning or unlearning falls
For the people who work in organisations, unlearning is not necessarily a linear or sequential process, nor does it always result in the discarding of old knowledge (Howells and Scholderer, 2016; Klein, 1989; Tsang, 2008)
Summary
The creation, capture and transfer of knowledge has long been a focus of the knowledge management literature. As Huber (1991: 88) notes, the literature on acquiring knowledge is ‘voluminous and multi-faceted’. Unlearning, the ways firms unlearn old knowledge, routines and practices, has received much less attention. Hedberg’s (1981) ‘How organisations learn and unlearn’ is strongly weighted towards learning at the expense of unlearning, and there has been a relative paucity of empirical studies addressing unlearning (De Holan and Phillips, 2011; Easterby-Smith et al, 2004; Thompson, 2007; Tsang and Zara, 2008). Unlearning has been somewhat a Procrustean bed. Most ignore the inconvenient fact that it is the people, who work in organisations, to whom the task of learning or unlearning falls
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