RETHINKING INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY: AN ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS APPROACH FOR DISRUPTIVE CONTEXTS

Abstract

Institutional Memory (IM) is often treated in Information Systems as a passive repository of data, routines, or archives. This paper argues instead that IM functions as the recursive infrastructure that enables and constrains the very subsystems through which organizations achieve viability. We advance the Adaptive Viable System Model (AVSM), an extension of Beer’s cybernetic framework, in which IM is theorized not as content within organizational processes but as the connective medium through which sensing, control, learning, and adaptation unfold. Two novel subsystems are introduced: System D (Disruption Awareness), conceptualized as an epistemic filter that distinguishes routine disturbances from paradigm-threatening anomalies; and System R (Resilience Memory), defined as a repository of anti-procedural knowledge, successful improvisations and deviations that conventional systems are designed to erase. By positioning IM as the active architecture of digital governance, the AVSM reveals how memory infrastructures generate both capacities and silences. Importantly, the framework integrates the lens of epistemic justice, showing how memory systems can either reproduce exclusions or preserve marginalized and vernacular knowledges that are vital under disruption. The paper contributes a novel theoretical vocabulary for IS research and outlines a design-oriented agenda for resilient digital governance in disruptive environments.