The communicative constitution of organizational memory

Laaksonen, Salla-Maaria Lambotte, François [UCL]

Memory and memorizing as organizational phenomena have been extensively addressed within the field of organization studies. However, they are often described through human agency without addressing the role of communication theoretically or empirically. In this chapter we suggest that the communication-centered perspective of communicative constitution of organization (CCO) theories could support the empirical investigation of the social processes considered essential to organizational memory. Likewise, organization memory studies (OMS) could support CCO-oriented studies to better account for the historical, temporal, and social embeddedness of the studied forms and modalities of communication. In this chapter, we discuss how CCO concepts can enrich OMS along three axes: (1) how remembering and forgetting constitute an organization, (2) how communication constitutes memory in practice, and (3) how traces of past communicative events accumulated across communication platforms contribute to the organizationality of collectives. We believe both the constitutive role of memory as communication and the communicative constitution of memory are fruitful areas for future studies.