Organisational Learning

This paper reviews the literature on organisational learning. Organisational learning is viewed as routine-based, history-dependent, and target-oriented. Organisations are seen as learning by encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behaviour. Within this perspective on organisational learning, topics covered include how organisations learn from direct experience, how organisations learn from the experience of others, and how organisations develop conceptual frameworks or paradigms for interpreting that experience. The section on organisational memory discusses how organisations encode, store, and retrieve the lessons of history despite the turnover of personnel and the passage of time. Organisational learning is further complicated by the ecological structure of the simultaneously adapting behaviour of other organisations, and by an endogenously changing environment. The final section discusses the limitations as well as the possibilities of organisational learning as a form of intelligence.

[Abstract from Annual Review of Sociology]