"Community of memory" is unnecessary to our understanding of organizational ethics

As I read Arnett et al.'s argument for the omnipresence of an "organizational conscience" that frames the identity, narrative, and political life of a community, I found the idea of organizational memory to be somewhat at odds with many practical examples of organizational communication from my life (Arnett et al. 145). Whether among students in extracurricular clubs or new classmates, communication as it functions toward a shared goal or purpose (by definition, organizational communication) begins without a shared perception of that organization's communicative history. Even past this point, when, after weeks of mornings in the Ford Hall basement or years of group meetings, new "embedded agents" come along as cogs in the group wheel, organizational communication proceeds without an absolute, insoluble shared narrative (146). New members are, from the moment of their induction, essential to the communicative fabric of an organization, especially since their contention over, or misunderstanding of, the group's organizational memory is an example of "(emergent sayings) that offer a contending sense of the good" (146). And yet new members can offer narrative contention while contributing to the group's overall purpose, even through communicative action, without ever acknowledging or bothering to learn or accept the organization's communal memory. In other words, we can help our neighbors without knowing them.

That same memory shifts and adapts to these new, unaffiliated perspectives--the narrative contention introduced by new members, who hold no concept of the group's community of memory, becomes a part of and forever changes that narrative. Arnett and co. acknowledge that organizational memory is ever-shifting and far from concrete, subject to constant reinterpretation and existing alongside a multiplicity of competing organizational memories held by members of the same group. In light of these tacit admissions, I'd go one step further and suggest that the concept of organizational memory is rhetorically useless. In its attempt to envelop competing understandings of the good under a term that invites warm feelings of a shared narrative, "community of memory" is itself a contradiction that devalues the Other and confuses the individual's contribution to a group's purpose.

That purpose, I contend, exists separately from the narrative that inevitably forms around it. We can function as a group and work toward a shared purpose without a community of memory. To acknowledge the narrative and good of the Other, and how a multiplicity of these things forms a space of dialogic difference, is simply communication ethics. "Community of memory," meanwhile, is an umbrella term that unnecessarily tries to make sense of otherness in a space where we intuitively expect sameness. But organizational communication is just communication between people "to accomplish a given purpose or purposes" (Arnett et al. 138). To be ethical in our communication, we don't need a term that lumps together what we already know and respect in the Other under a notion of "shared difference." Shared difference is just difference, and to assimilate competing goods into a single organizational story downplays the communicative life that postmodernity breathes.