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Schatzki’s (2006) brief conception of organizational and practice memory considers organizations as sites where work practices are brought together with material arrangements. When combined, the two form episodes, or ‘happenings’ of practice (p. 1864). As practices are re-enacted in the organization by means of what Schatzki (2006) refers to as teleological structures, they also persist from the past into the future. Organizational memory ensues as long as practices are enacted within the material arrangements of present in an organization. It is thus an aggregation of all practices performed within an organization and, by extension, of memories of all performed practices.

Elaborating on how organizational memory as an aggregate property of organizational practices looks like, Schatzki (2006) proposed that organizations enact organizational memory by means of ‘the complex of actions, thoughts, experiences, abilities, and readinesses’ (ibid: 1870). This five-point definition is what I will be evaluating against the empirical dataset here. Accordingly, organizational memory as a practice may consist of the following:

Actions: this refers to organized sets, or regimes, of doings and sayings (Geiger, 2009; Whittington, 2011). As individuals in organizations enact work practices, actions are the basic manifestations of ‘performative understanding of reality’ (Latour, 2005). In other words, individuals only do what is intelligible, so by performing regimented activity individuals engage in particular understandings

64 of the world, work and other practices around them. In organizations this is, in part, evident through specialization of skills and division of workforce into specialisms;

Thoughts: Schatzki (2006: 1869) positions ‘thoughts’ as negotiations among practitioners about what constitutes a ‘good practice’. This is a normative dimension of organizational memory because thoughts, in this understanding, enact organizational memory by keeping the actions of practitioners ‘appropriately regarded as answerable to norms of correct and incorrect practice’ (Rouse, 2001: 190; also Shotter and Tsoukas, 2014);

Experiences: the exact meaning of ‘experiences’ with regards to organizational memory is not entirely clear. It seems that this has to do with where individual practitioners are relative to their peers in the mastery of the practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Schatzki, 2002). If so, this dimension also entails coordination of practices along the demarcations of knowledge-based expert power (Hsiao et al., 2012; Kravcenko and Swan, 2016). Alternatively, experiences may refer to socialization of individuals into particular practices;

Abilities: this refers to knowledge of how to do something. In a narrow sense it seems that ability is a faculty of an individual that allows repeat performance of particular actions. In a broader sense ability might entail knowledge in general - of how to do things, of how things should be done (i.e. thoughts) and of what to do things with. In regards to the latter, this would involve knowledge of the material world and of which parts of it can be used and in which ways (Gherardi, 2006; Heidegger, 1978; Orlikowski, 2010);

Readinesses: related to abilities but with reference to anticipation (Nicolini, 2009). In a sense, practitioners are always anticipating the practice they are performing (Shotter, 2006; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011). Closely related to the phenomenological idea of protention (Merleau-Ponty, 2005), readinesses of practitioners can be understood as related to their abilities to enact organizational memory.

It is also worth noting that, regarding the context for these five characteristics of organizational memory, Schatzki (2006) appears to be considering organizational

65 memory in terms of historical realism. Past enactments of practices that constitute an organization, of which organizational memory is a register of, are seen as trajectories into the future. While the future in this case can consist of multiple potentialities, the past does not appear to be subject to change and re-interpretation (or this is not seen as a relevant issue given anticipatory nature of practices). With reference to the more traditional thinking about organizational memory in management (i.e. following Walsh and Ungson, 1991), such a view is in contrast to that of past and memory as a manageable attribute of the organization (see Chapter 2 section on ‘Organizational memory as an attribute’). What follows from this is the reduced importance of past events that are re- classified as actualized anticipations.

Where previous work portrayed the temporal aspect of organizational memory in linear terms - focusing on either bringing the past into the present or interpreting the present through the past (see Chapter 3) - practice memory considers organizational memory to be recursive, which, rather paradoxically, renders it future-oriented. While Schatzki (2006) does not consider this in depth, he does mention that individuals strive towards what they perceive as important and significant out of the past and into the future. This holds true for both organizational memory and for practice memory.

3.5 SUMMARY

This chapter has set out a foundation for further empirical investigation of organizational memory from the practice-theoretical perspective. Resting on the ontological and epistemological foundations of Heideggerian phenomenology and Whitehead’s view of temporality, this chapter built on, and expanded beyond, Schatzki’s (2006) brief outline of what organizational memory as a practice may look like and work as. While Schatzki (2006) provided some intriguing insight via his essay on organizational memory as a practice, such as the inclusion of a distinction between practice memory and organizational memory to which I will pay continuous attention throughout the empirical chapters, he did not present a coherent qualitative investigation of how, or why, organizational memory considered through the lens of practice would work the way he argued it should. Fundamentally, this approach differs little from the

66 anthropocentric bias presented throughout Chapter 2, and so Schatzki (2006, 2012) still leaves much to be desired in terms of building explanatory theory.

Following the next Chapter, where I am going to present and discuss methods for this study, the remainder of the thesis is going to go beyond existing work on organizational memory as a practice in order to derive empirical foundations, principles and patterns of how mundane activities of individuals and groups of individuals result in temporal assemblages that display characteristics similar to those of what cognitive memory, as is commonly understood. That being said, building on Schatzki (2006, 2012) does provide a valuable point of departure with respect of what to look for in the empirical setting, which is how the initial stages of this study are going to proceed (Chapter 5) before departing and detaching into an independent qualitative investigation informed by the principles outlined in this and the next Chapters.

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