Research pick: "Unlearning: a systematic literature review"

An international team from Bahrain, Estonia, Germany, and Hungary has looked at the notion of unlearning in the face of new paradigms, understanding and knowledge.

Information and communication technology (ICT) has changed the way we work and in the current crises of climate change, pollution, and emergent disease is more important than ever. Workers, students, and the populus in general must learn new skills and develop new capacity to utilise the ICT of the day as it evolves rapidly. Critically, this is where forgetting the old ways, or unlearning redundant and obsolete knowledge and skills becomes important so that the culture of old technology is not conflated and confused with the new.

Susanne Durst of the Department of Business Administration in the School of Business and Governance at Tallinn University of Technology, in Estonia, Ilka of the Heinze School of Management and Organizational Science at Kaposvár University, in Hungary, Thomas Henschel of the Business School at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin, Germany, and Nishad Nawaz of the College of Business Administration at Kingdom University in Bahrain discuss the concepts and provide a literature review of unlearning in the International Journal of Business and Globalisation.

“Unlearning of old knowledge, practices, and routines may be key to success. It is argued that an unwillingness or inability to unlearn old knowledge can hamper creativity and innovation in organisations when employees are unwilling to view new knowledge that they do not possess or control as useful or applicable,” the team writes.

Their review reveals gaps in the business knowledge of unlearning. When looking both at the individual as well as organisational levels, there is a clear call for the application of more sophisticated research methods to allow for triangulation, they report. The research findings are practical for entrepreneurs and managers but also highlight where more research might be done to create a more coherent literature in this area and provide guidance for those entrepeneurs and managers, as well as others.

Durst, S., Heinze, I., Henschel, T. and Nawaz, N. (2020) ‘Unlearning: a systematic literature review’, Int. J. Business and Globalisation, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp.472–495.