Can Organizations Really Unlearn?

The complex phenomenon of organizational change is a continuous challenge for scientists and for practitioners alike. Simple models tend to be regularly worn out by field evidence. More and more factors must be taken into account in order to ensure a better reliability of change models. A recently proposed solution suggests that learning theory should be placed more centrally within the theory of planned organizational change (Hendry, 1996; Schein, 1993; Kilmann, 1989). However, this research direction has already been broached, although under a slightly different perspective. Early studies (Starbuck and Heberg, 1976; Hedberg et al. 1976) have shown that organizational change should initially go through an unlearning phase. The elimination of old, obsolete organizational knowledge–that is, unlearning–makes room for the development of new adaptive capacities (Hedberg, 1981; Nystrom and Starbuck, 1984; Hedberg et al. 1976; Markoczy, 1994; Starbuck, 1989). This paper reviews the different conceptualizations of the unlearning process in the research literature. The integration of these various perspectives allows inferring that organizational unlearning is mainly apprehended as a tool for the removal of ineffcient behavior in favor of an adaptive one. A subsequent analysis of the intimate bonds between organizational knowledge and actions (Pfeffer and Sutton, 1999; Kuwada, 1998; Klein, 1989) shows that other knowledge manipulation processes may have the same behavioral effect. Two new processes are proposed. Knowledge inactivation and rivaling enforced enactment eliminate undesired behaviors by altering the perceived validity and, respectively, the operational capacity of underlying organizational knowledge. All together, unlearning, rivaling enactment, and knowledge inactivation are labeled as knowledge neutralization phenomena. The article concludes over the place of the newly proposed class of processes in a change context. It is argued that, although the neutralization of old knowledge is not imperative for learning, its behavioral effects provide support for organizational change. Furthermore, knowledge inactivation, rivaling enactment, and unlearning seem to fit in specific organizational settings, according to the time and resources available. An analysis of management literature uncovers latent evidence for these findings (Lorsch, 1986; Starbuck and Laudon, 1996; Carmona and Grönlund, 1998).