By demonstrating their distinctive traits through his anthropological research, Lévi-Strauss has developed the concept of 'cold' or 'hot' societies.
A cold society records or even ritualises facts and events which concern it directly, without necessarily linking them to daily life, but rather to the social future of those who make up this society.
A hot society, on the other hand, integrates those facts and events into the individual and collective memories of that particular society. It thus creates a collective memory which never stops 'feeling' or 'updating' itself. This memory could be said to have become a 'past-social construction', allowing for greater understanding of the future.
So how now to best understand the 'heat' of a society's memory with regard to its 'coldness'?
The idea of incorporation can help to better understand the difference between the two, even though it must be admitted that such types of memory can just as easily be found within a same organisation.
To simultaneously simplify and shed a little light on the subject, the following hypothesis must be put forward: 'hot' memory lives in and throughout the body; it appears indistinguishable from any sensitivity and demonstrates the real internalisation of a past which is never eternally rooted in various documents and rituals.
Based on this, a past in continually called upon in order to make our lives that little more clear; feelings, concerns, reflections over what is, or what will be, appear as numerous 'journeys' into a memory situated at the very heart of individual and collective subjectivity. The past can never be external to any member of a hot society.
In his book 'La mémoire culturelle. Ecriture, souvenir et imaginaire politique dans les civilisations antiques' (Cultural Memory: Writing, Remembering and Political Identity in Early Civilizations), published in 1992 and which has only just been recently translated into French, the great German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann, adopts these concepts so as to apply them to Egyptian, Greek and Jewish civilisations.
We can see that, as opposed to the hot memory of the Jews who construct their collective history and memory on a divine relationship, or to the Greeks who, in an off-key polyphony, comment endlessly, to make themselves live forever, on all their philosophical scripts, the Egyptians, who make their texts so sacred that they are frozen in time, have a cold memory.
Finding sense in a historical logic, internalised by individuals and groups and permanent research for the presence of truth is true for the first kind of society noted above; making sacred various figurative art for the service of eternal repetition is true for the second kind of society noted above.
Drawing inspiration from the historical analysis of Jan Assmann encourages us to consider that one of the conditions for the survival and development of our modern societies and companies involves caring for our hot memory. This presupposes that all those involved, along with professional communities, come together to jointly incorporate a past which is likely to shed new light upon initiatives and achievements.
Organised learning determines the most appropriate conditions for the development of hot memory. It occurs notably within communities of practice and fields of work.
These communities make up and stretch out across exchanges hugely facilitated by the new collaborative work technology of Web 2.0 and by what is now known as 'knowledge management'.
A source of continual innovation for new exchanges and uses, organised learning can generate hot memory once communities live and work by consistently incorporating former achievements, even if this incorporation is virtual.
In this sense, dynamic management of operational knowledge is a part of hot memory and, if necessary, our institutions and organisations.