Management of Organizational Forgetting in Construction of Organizational Absorptive Capacity

The integration of external and internal knowledge by means of absorptive capacity is a major source for an organization to enhance its competitive advantages. The previous researches pay too much attention to the absorbing process of useful knowledge from the perspective of organizational learning, but comparatively less attention is paid to some aspects like loss process of knowledge, invasion of harmful knowledge, deterioration of core knowledge and inflation of null knowledge. This paper explores the processing mechanism of absorptive capacity and constructs an integrating framework of absorptive capacity by introducing the patterns of organizational forgetting to match the phases of absorptive capacity. Meanwhile, a new perspective and some insights are provided for the management practice to improve absorptive capacity.