Institutional Amnesia: A Paradox of the 'Information Age'?

Christopher Pollitt

138 citations0/0 files storedPrometheus

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Organizational Learning and Leadership Management and Organizational Studies Policy Transfer and Learning

Abstract

It is one of the paradoxes of our age that, while new information technologies have provided us with the ability to store, retrieve, manipulate and communicate more data, faster than ever before, at the same time many of our public institutions seem to be losing their memories. Many texts have been written about 'organizational learning', but few about organizational forgetting. The core contention of this paper is that the phenomenon of organizational amnesia deserves attention, from scholars and practitioners alike. My aim, therefore, is to set out the character, causes and likely consequences of institutional memory loss in the contemporary public sector.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 138 citations exist upstream.

References

2004Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis 1994Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution 1983Sour Grapes 2000Public Management Reform. A Comparative Analysis 1996The Theory of Institutional Design 1998The Rhetoric and Reality of Total Quality Management 1998The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management 1991The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions, and Actions in Organizations.

Cited by

2018Linking turnover to organizational performance: the role of process conformance 2016Evidence translation: an exploration of policy makers’ use of evidence 2018Explaining institutional amnesia in government 2023Ignorance in organisations – a systematic literature review 2013Public Managers’ Skills Development for Effective Performance Management: Empirical evidence from Italian local governments 2018Building Australia's affordable housing industry: capacity challenges and capacity-enhancing strategies

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.