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 th...

Recent research expresses serious doubts on the concept of unlearning. It is argued that knowledge cannot be discarded or eliminated in order to make space for the creation of new knowledge. Taking into account the recent scepticism, we focus on the cognitive dimension of unlearning and propose an alternative conceptualization. Considering how far unlearning can go from a psychological/cognitiv...

Within the literature, unlearning as distinct from learning, at both the individual and organisational level, is receiving increased attention. This paper explores unlearning in terms of its relationship to the existing literature on types of knowledge, how unlearning is suggested to occur within different levels of knowledge, and finally the link to individual and organisational learning. This...

This study examines the concept of unlearning, the process of disuse or replacement of an action, procedure or belief in favor of a new one, in the context of healthcare. Little is known about the true nature of unlearning and related learning change processes within the context of healthcare. The study of unlearning continues to be important not only due to the nature of the discipline itself,...

Learning in health care is essential if healthcare organisations are to tackle a challenging quality of care agenda. Yet while we know a reasonable amount about the nature of learning, how learning occurs, the forms it can take, and the routines that encourage it to happen within organisations, we know very little about the nature and processes of unlearning. We review the literature addressing...

Humans are able to rapidly adapt their movements when a visuomotor or other systematic perturbation is imposed. However, the adaptation is forgotten or unlearned equally rapidly once the perturbation is removed. The ultimate cause of this unlearning remains poorly understood. Unlearning is often considered to be a passive process due to inability to retain an internal model. However, we have re...

In patient care, maintaining skill competencies during technological advances requires effective knowledge changes processes. One method used consists of task repetition until errors are non-existent and successful demonstration of new learning is complete however, adjusting to numerous procedural changes may be difficult. Determining how to maximize change process during competency acquisition...

Unlearning is the deliberate undoing or reversal of what has been previously learned. This skill has been acknowledged in business and academia as being increasingly important for engineers in a highly changeable 21st century environment; additionally, industry have recently flagged a real-world skill deficit in graduates that can be remedied using the concept of unlearning. This paper shows th...

Purpose – One of the critical issues for change management, particularly in relation to the implementation of new technologies, is the existence of prior knowledge and established mental models which may hinder change efforts. Understanding unlearning and how it might assist during organizational change is a way to address this resistance. The purpose of this paper is to present research design...

In this paper we consider probabilities of different asymptotics of convergent unlearning algorithm for the Hopfield-type neural network (Plakhov & Semenov, 1994) treating the case of unbiased random patterns. We show also that failed unlearning results in total memory breakdown.