‘The Castaways of Life’: A study of organizational remembering within the context of a Chilean Geriatric Hospital

† The expression ‘For the Castaways of Life’ appears in a plaque under a statue that is located in the gardens of the National Geriatric Institute (NGI). This statue is one of the few objects that has been preserved from the time when the NGI was a hospice.

Abstract

This paper explores the phenomenon of organizational memory within the context of a Chilean Geriatric Hospital that has undergone profound institutional transformations during the last 40 years. The effects of such transformations have reinforced an emphasis on progress at the expense of remembering and integrating the past of the institution as a hospice. The study reveals that this institutional past reverberates in the hospital's working dynamics, which contributes to generating confusion in collective identity, as well as to affect the accomplishment of primary tasks and people's well-being. Access to organizational memory is carried out by the registration of some members' remembering practices about the hospital's past, which are analysed through a hermeneutic method. The study is ethnographic and interpretative, and the recollection of data combines interviews, methods of observation, and the revision of documents.

Keywords:

• organizational remembering
• forgetting
• memory
• identity
• change

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Paul Hoggett for his comments to an early draft of this article, as well as for all the thoughtful suggestions made by the three anonymous C&O referees that greatly contributed to improve the quality of the last version of the paper. We are also grateful to Dr Roberto Stein for his help in the paper translation. This research was supported by FONIS, CONICYT (grant number SA08I20028).

Notes

† The expression ‘For the Castaways of Life’ appears in a plaque under a statue that is located in the gardens of the National Geriatric Institute (NGI). This statue is one of the few objects that has been preserved from the time when the NGI was a hospice.

1. Olick (1999) emphasizes the need to distinguish between two different concepts of collective memory. The first is called ‘collected memory’ and refers to the ‘aggregation of socially framed individual memories’ based on individualistic principles. By contrast, the collectivist approaches to memory challenge the very notion of an individual memory, and develop methods to study social and cultural patterns of remembrance.

2. This decision marked a significant milestone in the history of Hospice, not only due to people's transfer to new places, but also due to the brutal uprooting of their residents. The institution suffered a profound break in its identity and a large reduction in the number of residents (from 1000 to 400 people).

3. During these years, he fulfilled executive posts in other hospitals before his arrival at the NGI.

4. The relationship between NGI and sexually transmitted diseases has a historical background, since in the past many patients with skin complications due to sexually transmitted diseases were treated here.

5. This is a public service in charge of regulating social security matters.

6. Aging, sickness, and poverty are dimensions of the human experience that undermine and derail the ideals of sustained progress, youth, happiness, and the aspiration of prosperity that sustain the functioning of post-industrial organizations (Sievers 2009). The visceral rejection of these dimensions, one which is increased by strong demands to maintain high growth and efficiency levels, reveals the difficulties that western narcissistic cultures have in integrating these ‘facts of life’ with everyday experience (Hoggett 2006, 181).

7. These three residents are the only survivors from the hospice years. They arrived to the Hospice as little children and they have lived there all their life.

8. This tension reveals the clash of two different models of care that were described by Miller and Gwynne (1972) in the context of a study with residential institutions for severely physically handicapped patients. The NGI's current focus on rehabilitation has close similarities with the horticultural model of care, which attempts to provide opportunities for the growth of patients' residual abilities, though sometimes denying disabilities. However, this health approach seems to be constantly threatened by the implementation of a warehousing model of care, which as a main priority, seeks to prolong patients' lives by encouraging their dependence on the staff.

9. One healthcare worker states: ‘That's what we miss these days, that union that existed before. Because here the doctors sometimes pass by you and they don't even say “hello”. They ignore us completely, and they don't take us seriously.’

10. Gabriel (2000, 172–173) defines nostalgia ‘as a social phenomenon whose expressions are often shared with others’, and whereby people selectively idealize and infuse present conditions with emotional and personal memories of the past. Therefore, ‘nostalgia is a state arising out of present conditions as much as out of the past itself’.

11. One healthcare worker states: ‘In the hospice, work was calm, the work environment was good, there was camaraderie. Now to the contrary, if you can be eliminated, they get rid of you.’

12. This idealization can also be explained by what Speck (1994, 97) calls ‘chronic niceness’. Healthcare workers who work with terminally ill people run the risk of acting out a collective fantasy that they are nice people, who care for nice dying people. This idealized mental state is the result of the collusion between individual and organization whereby negative aspects of daily care of these vulnerable people are split off and denied. The incarnation of this fantasy protects everybody from confronting ‘very primitive and powerful feelings which are disturbingly not-nice’.