The foundational work of organizational learning.

The idea that it is through ‘organizational learning processes, that the firm adapts to its environment’ (1963:84)

The view that the firm learns from its experience’ (1963: 100)

Emphasize the role of rules, procedures, and routines in response to external shocks and which are more or less likely to be adopted according to whether or not they lead to positive consequences for the organization.

An organization changes its behavior in response to short-run feedback from the environment according to some fairly well defined rules. It changes rules in response to longer-run feedback according to some more general rules, and so on. (1963: 101/2)

"Organizational learning" appeared in the title, and although the paper is based on tendentious data, it already makes a distinct contribution to debates in the field.

A model based on tensions between individual and organizational levels of learning, which is similar to the notion of organizational learning being a discontinuous process (Argyris and Schön, 1978).

It laid out the field as a whole very clearly, and their distinction between organizations with and without the capacity to engage in significant learning received a great deal of attention.

Hedberg (1981)

Shrivastra (1983)

Daft and Weick (1984)

Fiol and Lyles (1985)

Contains a number of highly cited articles

A foundational work and a popularizer because it rapidly became a key source for academics as well as an inspiration for practitioners.

Attracted enormous interest particularly because companies and consultants were searching for new ideas to replace the largely discredited concepts of corporate excellence.

Ideas were highly attractive because they provided the potential for renewal and growth, with an underpinning of both technical and social ideas.

Set the standard for the emergent field with a rich mixture of concepts and field data.

Key Ideas

Criticism

It starts with the neo-economic view of the strategic value of organizational knowledge and then uses familiar IT software such as databases and electronic conferencing to facilitate the acquisition, sharing, storage, retrieval, and utilization of knowledge.

An informal review of current citation patterns for recently-published papers

An overview of the predictions from authors who have contributed to this Handbook

The results of our own discussions as we have developed the Handbook