How the memory of interactions at work makes cooperation complex

Cooperation in work settings goes through communicative interactions where colleagues need to reach a certain level of mutual understanding for coordinating their actions or finding negotiated decisions. Mutual understanding is complex because of the heterogeneity of the participants which makes the interpretations uncertain and unpredictable. We argue here that chronic cooperation is still more complex because the memory of the previous cooperative interactions is an additional source of difference between the cognitive contexts of the participants. We studied the memory of cooperative interactions in four different collaborative work settings. The analysis indicates a massive forgetting of the verbal content and a greater remembering of the relational positionings, interactional structures and emotions.