Organizational Learning Research Paper

Therefore, study of organizations as if they were systems of knowing and learning may be of assistance in the design of knowledge intensive organizations and of networks of organizations that create and transfer knowledge. At a theoretical level, the representation of the learning organization may stand as a valid theoretical alternative to the rational organization because it replaces the classical concept of the organization that acts according to the principles of rational choice with that of the organization which acts according to principles of experimentation, of trial and error, of success and failure, of discovery and invention.

The following sections outline the history of the concept of organizational learning, the divergences between two bodies of literature—organizational learning and learning organization—as they grew in the 1990s, and the further development in the field.

1. A Brief History Of The Concept Of Organizational Learning

The first mentions of the concept can be traced back to March and Simon (1958), but for long it was peripheral to organizational theory. March has always alluded to learning and to the link between learning and decision-making processes, although only few of his works are specifically devoted to this topic.

The work generally recognized as pioneer in the field is by Argyris and Schon (1974) and a brief historical excursus into the literature on organizational learning will illustrate how researchers interested in knowledge have examined specific organizational phenomena in terms of learning defined in variety of ways:

(a) As learning curves (Yelle 1979), a concept which probably stands at the basis of the most long-standing interest in learning. Learning curves rest on the principle that the man-hours required to produce a unit of output decrease in proportion to the experience accumulated. Productive processes display characteristic learning curves in relation to a set of organizational factors. Hence derives the idea that there is something more than mere individual learning and that experience constitutes a transferable body of knowledge that may become institutionalized and incorporated into situations different from the original ones.

(b) As Behavioral change through trial and error. Learning is a self-regulating process which detects errors and corrects them or, if preferred, which checks actions against their outcomes and makes appropriate adjustments to subsequent actions. This conception may be applied to the organization as an information processor or as a producer of knowledge on the nexuses between input and output and their reception by the environment.

(c) As adaptation to the Environment, and therefore as the capacity to ‘fit in,’ to adjust to external stimuli which must be discovered opportunely and rapidly. Learning is, therefore, synonymous with structural change and acts as a signal of successful evolution. Moreover, learning as systemic wisdom does not come about solely within organizations or within competitive relationships among organizations. It also appears in the networks of informal learning (Trist 1983) established among numerous organizations by means of collaborative exchanges.

(d) As economy of search. The economizing of cognitive energies in problem solving has been demonstrated by Newell and Simon (1972). New solutions are first looked for in familiar settings and then, because the costs of the search increase proportionately, in progressively more unfamiliar ones. Those solutions that have proved valid in the past are more likely to be the ones adopted in the future. They are learnt and retained as long as they continue to function. Learning takes place through the incorporation of experience into search rules, attention rules, and organizational goals.

(e) As the modification of mental maps. Since Argyris and Schon (1974) pointed out the gap between what organizations say they do (exposed theory) and what they actually do (theory-in-use), learning resides in the ability to bring explanations and the ideas guiding what is done into alignment with the organizational changes introduced. These authors make explicit reference to the cybernetic analogy; but at the same time they stress that organizational change requires modification of the way in which organizations represent reality to themselves. Organizational change and learning proceed in parallel.

The diverse knowledge interests of researchers have located learning at various positions along a continuum with adaptation to the environment at one extreme (together with the analogy of the cybernetic system) and the autonomous elaboration of thought at the other (together with the analogy of the organization as a mind).

In order to show the polysemy of the term ‘learning’, I shall refer to four systematic surveys of studies on organizational learning (Argyris and Schon 1978, Shrivastava 1983, Fiol and Lyles 1985, Huber 1991) that were published when the aim was to integrate the field and which comprise approximately 200 titles.

Argyris and Schon (1978) identify six conceptualizations of learning, according to how the organization is conceived:

(a) if it is a group, then learning takes place at the level of the interactions among individuals performing a task;

(b) if it is a collective actor, it learns from the experience stored in organizational maps and actionplans;

(c) if it is a structure, it learns by changing in accordance with the external and internal environment;

(d) if it is a system, it learns through error-regulating mechanisms;

(e) if it is a cultural system, learning is a process of socialization, of transformation of cognitive and judgmental patterns, as well as deliberate transformation of reality;

(f) if it is a political arena, the subject-matter of learning is the strategies—competitive and cooperative—employed to control organizational dynamics.

Shrivastava (1983) identifies four conceptualizations of organizational learning: as institutionalized experience, as adaptation, as knowledge of actionoutcome relationships, as assumption sharing. In the first conception, by organizational learning is meant only that learning embedded in standard operating procedures, methods of communication and coordination, and shared understanding about tasks that have a persistent effect. In the adaptive approach, organizational learning is a complex process of mutual intraorganizational regulation triggered by the combination of different kinds of perceived stress. From the perspective of organizations as systems of knowledge of action-outcome relationships, organizations are purposeful systems or information processors relying on available inputs to confront the turbulence of their environment. From the assumption-sharing perspective, organizations are artifacts based on the cognitive maps that their members use to orient themselves in their interactions, and organizational learning consists of the process whereby these maps are modified.

The third typology (Fiol and Lyles 1985) seeks to prescribe what can be legitimately defined as organizational learning. Fiol and Lyles distinguish between the development of behavior and the development of cognition, so that changes of behavior constitute adaptation while learning only takes place within cognition where it is hierarchized into low-level (singleloop) and high-level (double-loop) learning. For Fiol and Lyles, organizational learning consists in the improvement of actions through better knowledge and understanding, while cognition is the development of reflections, knowledge and associations between past actions, their efficacy and future actions. But if we examine the definitions of learning and cognition more closely we discern the profound embarrassment, shared by all inquiries in the field, over a too-sharp distinction drawn between thinking and doing, over the difficulty of establishing a logical priority between thought and action, between the self-constitution of the subject (individual or organization) and its self-relationing to the environment.

Although complex, Fiol and Lyles (1985) distinguish three areas of agreement among studies on learning:

acknowledgment of the importance of adjustment to the environment;

a distinction drawn between learning by individuals and learning by organizations;

identification of four contextual factors which create and reinforce learning, and which are created by learning in turn: culture, strategy, structure, and environment.

Another influential survey of the literature is by Huber (1991), who proposes closer integration among studies of organizational learning. Huber identifies four constructs correlated with learning: knowledge acquisition, information distribution, the interpretation of information, and organizational memory. There is an abundant and diversified literature on the first two constructs, but the last two have been relatively ignored and require a great deal of further empirical research.

Huber concentrates on knowledge acquisition, which he divides into five subprocesses by which an organization acquires knowledge. It should be stressed, in fact, that Huber views learning as a process which he defines as follows: ‘An entity learns if, through its processing of information, the range of its potential behaviors is changed’ (Huber 1991). Unlike other authors, therefore, Hubert does not assume that learning immediately translates into either change or increased learning or into competitive advantage.

2. The Growth Of The Field And The Growing Divergences Within It

At the same time that Huber’s review was published another authoritative voice remarked that: ‘people in organization theory began to talk about learning … just about the time psychologists began to desert the concept’ (Weick 1991). One of the main liabilities of the concept of organizational learning is that the traditional psychological models of learning (based on stimulus-response theory) have been transferred acritically to the study of organizational learning and with them a realist ontology, notwithstanding that the growth of the field began in those years since the field attracted the attention of scholars from different disciplines.

The growth of the field can be explained by at least three external factors: the speed of technological change, the advance of globalization, and growing corporate competition (Easterby-Smith et al. 1998). The speed of technological change means that there is continual pressure on firms to reduce the time from conception to launch of new products, and communications innovations mean that companies and knowledge workers within them may have to adapt radically and in unforeseen directions. As a consequence, firms cannot rely on established practices, they need to learn new ways of doing things. The advance of globalization provides an additional source of pressure. It started with the opening up of labor markets in Asia in the early 1980s, and in Central Europe in the late 1980s, and it has accelerated with the establishment of global financial markets and with the establishment of global consumer markets nourished by the spending power of new middle classes in emerging economies such as India and China. To compete on a global scale, companies need to increase radically their scales of operation in order to keep up with the evolution of new technologies and businesses anywhere in the world. The preceding factors lead to a widely-held view that the most important contributor to corporate competitiveness in the future is going to be the ability of each organization to learn faster than its rivals.

In a scenario of fast economic and technological changes, knowledge came to be seen as an invisible asset and many consultants and firms caught onto the commercial significance of organizational learning. Two concepts express this move: the economics of knowledge and the leaning organization. What they have in common is the managerial interest in bringing knowledge under control at the service of production or innovation.

The exploitative ethos is particularly evident in the economics of knowledge and in knowledge management, whose starting point has been the identification of knowledge as a production factor distinct from the traditional ones of capital, labor, and land. The resource-based theory of the firm has conceptualized knowledge as ‘core competencies’ or ‘core capabilities,’ naturalizing the relationship by means of the metaphor of the tree of knowledge: the trunk and major limbs are core products and the root system is the core competence (Prahalad and Hamel 1990). The reification of knowledge has grown more overt with the ‘objectified transferable commodity’ envisaged by the knowledge-management approach, which treats knowledge as practically synonymous with information created, disseminated, and embedded in products, services, and systems. A number of theorists have focused on making practical interventions in organizations in order to help them to become ‘learning organizations.’ Some models of learning organizations have been based on observations of organizations that appeared to be good at learning and elements of good practice have been extracted and synthesized. Although the idea of a leaning organization is drawn on insights from organizational learning, nevertheless the two literatures have developed along different tracks and around them two different scientific communities are gathered. The divergences concern the questions of the why, what, and how of organizational learning, and also dilemmas about how to conduct research into it (Easterby-Smith et al. 1998):

(a) Why organizational learning? Two bodies of literature have developed according to whether the aim is analytic and descriptive or action oriented and prescriptive. The former focuses on ‘How does an organization learn?’ The latter focuses on ‘How should an organization learn?’

(b) What is organizational learning? This question debates ontologies and the choice between a realist or a constructionist approach. It is about whether organizational learning is best seen as a rational and technical process or whether humanistic and political perspectives provide the best insights. A focus on data and information processing is likely to lead to assumptions of rationality which can be aided with appropriate learning technology, whereas the focus on human behavior inevitably leads to concern about hidden motives, emotions, and the possibility of political calculation.

(c) Which methods of inquiry? This area of divergence involves epistemologies and the preferred ways of inquiring into the nature of organizational learning. The major divide is between positivist methods with the emphasis on measurement and constructionist methods which emphasize language and the uniqueness of meaning systems. In general, there is a preference for quantitative methods (and for an individual/cognitive framework) in the USA due to the influence of academic journal house styles and research training in the management field; this contrasts with the strong development of qualitative methods (and a social/cultural framework) in European countries.

(d) How to implement organizational learning? A debate is open between incrementalists and radicals. Incremental learning is not only seen to be most common in organizations but also rather useful. A more radical perspective is represented by those who argue that because organizations normally operate on single-loop learning principles, it is more important for them to develop the capability of double-loop learning. A second debate is between those in the organizational development community who employ stage theories and those who use cyclical models. The former would suggest variously that there are qualitative differences between organizational processes and that these form progressive hierarchies. Those who propose cyclical models prefer to see the learning organization as a continual process of striving and improvement, that incorporates successive stages of data gathering, reflection, conceptualization, and experimentation.

The dilemma—as March (1996) expressed it—is between exploration and exploitation in the use of knowledge. The same dilemma is reflected also in the way knowledge is conceived and situated in the relationship between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge.

3. Looking Forward To Knowing In Practice

The utopia of unifying and integrating the field that characterized the 1980s failed in the 1990s and gave way to the encouragement of the existing diversity of perspectives. Within diversity, a ‘bandwagon’ of theorists started to move behind the concept of practice (or Activity) and the idea of community of practice as the place of learning.

Practice is the concept that allows the processes of ‘knowing’ at work and in organizing to be articulated as historical processes, material and indeterminate. In practice-based theorizing, different traditions of studying learning merge without losing their identity: situated learning theory offers the concept of community of practice, actor-network theory brings the idea of knowledge grounded in materiality, Activity theory offers a pragmatic theory of action, and the ethnographic study of knowledgable communities brings a research method which is anti-individualistic.

The specific contribution of practice-based theorizing to the study of organizational learning consists in the following propositions:

Knowing is situated (Suchman 1987), resilient but provisional.

Learning is acquired through participation in communities of practice (Wenger 1998).

Knowledge and action are located in ecologies of social-material relations (Star 1995).

Organizing can be seen as a ‘Activity system’ which reveals the tentative nature of knowledge and action (Blackler 1993). Incoherences, inconsistencies, paradoxes, and tensions are integral parts of Activity systems.

Practice involves the accomplishment of alignments across human and nonhuman elements (Law 1994) from particular positionings at a particular times, within a network of relations.

The field of organizational learning has grown very rapidly, attracting the attention of scholars from disparate disciplines such as psychology, sociology, economics, and information systems. As a consequence, the field has become conceptually fragmented but there may be considerable value in distinguishing between groups of researchers in order to sharpen the clarity with which elements of the field are understood and may be developed in a noncompetitive way.

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