Managing Obsolete Knowledge: towards a Clarified and Contextualized conception of unlearning

Although the IS literature has acknowledged the importance of unlearning in the context of IT change, research on unlearning has been marginal. Prior IS studies have identified four dominant mechanisms of unlearning, which are: individual forgetting; questioning and criticizing; stop using; and discarding. These four mechanisms reveal that there is not a clear conceptualization of unlearning that takes into account the aim and object of unlearning in the context of IT change. Based on insights from general management literature, we define organizational unlearning as intentional actions that organizations adopt to reduce the (potential) negative impacts of obsolete socio-technical elements on the IT change. In order to expand the insights of the previous IS studies, we explore how organizations apply unlearning during IT changes through a multiple case study research approach. Our empirical findings show that organizations adopt a wide range of unlearning practices in addition to practices that can be captured under the four mechanisms of unlearning in the IS literature. In addition, our empirical investigation highlights six characteristics of the IS domain that have a direct bearing on applying unlearning practices. Synthesizing the results of the empirical study with the insights in the IS literature, we show how the concept of ‘unlearning’ can be completed, specified, and contextualized in order to inform future studies in this area.