Institution

Business, Economics, and Social Sciences

Department

Sozialökonomie

Teaching staff

Dr. Fabian Hattke, Marcel Frank Volland

SDG-topic cluster

Sustainable infrastructure, cities, and communities

Comments/contents

“In doing so, organizational forgetting and unlearning, particularly of the voluntary kind, will leave the early and slightly naive conceptualizations and gain its central role as a core concept for organization theorists.” (Martin de Holan, 2011. 321) Change has become a continuous characteristic of the modern day business environment due to today`s rapidly changing environment. Hence, organizations generate more and more knowledge. Although most people can learn perpetually, unlearning or forgetting existing knowledge may become necessary to make way for more appropriate knowledge. The notion of letting old or obsolete knowledge go plays a vital role for sustainable organizational development. Both, deliberate or involuntary forgetting is regarded as a prevalent element of organizational life as it facilitates the elimination of obsolete knowledge and encourages innovation and new technologies. Besides, because companies have to fulfill customer requirements faster and faster, they also have to adapt their organizational structure quickly. Literature highlights the strategic relevance of organizational unlearning and forgetting in terms of sustainable competitive advantage and business performance. However, as compared to organizational learning, unlearning and forgetting have only received little attention in scholarly research.  

Learning objectives

The objectives of the seminar are: ·       Gain a detailed view on academic literature in the new field of organizational unlearning ·       Use different theories to assess the phenomenon of unlearning ·       Enable students to apply theories on unlearning with business cases ·       Enable students to write a term paper ·       Practice to give and work with feedback

Didactic concept

Seminar (2 SWS) In the first part of the course, the students are required to study one of the prescribed articles, relevant to unlearning in organizations. The structure of every session is as follows: The first speaker presents the content of the article in a 30-minute talk (one of the speaker’s further tasks is to introduce the author and to situate the article in the research context of the seminar). After the talk, a co-speaker formulates its view on the article in 15 minutes. The special task of the co-speaker is to compare its own view with the presentation of the speaker. Furthermore, the co-speaker needs to provide constructive feedback on the first speaker’s way of presentation. After both presentations, the course should start to discuss both statements. In the last two sessions students need to apply the learned theories of unlearning to selected Harvard Business Cases.

Semester

SoSe 19