organizational learning

42: Carnegie Mellon Series #5 – Organizational Learning

We discuss Barbara Levitt and James G. March’s article “Organizational Learning,” published in the 1988 edition of the Annual Review of Sociology. Although the authors hailed from Stanford University in California, we have included this episode in our Carnegie-Mellon Series because of James March’s involvement and perspectives on organization that clearly influenced the article. This work was a literature review across various streams in organizational learning up through the 1980s. Topics include learning from experience, organizational memory, ecologies of learning, and organizational intelligence. Of particular interest is how organizational learning was defined as not an outcome but a process of translating the cumulative experiences of individuals and codifying them as routines within the organization. From this, the authors applied the brain metaphor – such as memory and intelligence – to explain the phenomenon.Read More

24: Learning by Knowledge-Intensive Firms — Bill Starbuck

We discuss another of the classics from the Journal of Management Studies, a paper from 1992 by William Starbuck, entitled “Learning by knowledge-intensive firms”. This time, we are very happy to be joined by the author of the work, Professor William Starbuck, one of the leading experts in Organization Theory, whose research covers an incredible number of areas of expertise, as shown in his biography. This paper is the first to discuss knowledge intensive firms, concept based on the economists’ notions of capital and labour intensive firms, and which are defined as those firms where “knowledge has more importance than other inputs” (p.715).Read More

20: High Reliability in Practice – USN Rear Admiral Tom Mercer

Based around a classic work by Weick and Roberts (1993) on Collective Mind in Organizations - where the authors observed and analyzed the way people on the deck of an aircraft carrier function in a collective manner - this episode brings you a discussion of how concepts of High Reliability (see also Episode 11) flesh out in real life!Read More

19: Carnegie Mellon Series #2 – Exploration and Exploitation of Knowledge

In this episode, we read James March's widely cited article, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” published in 1991 in the journal Organization Science. In the paper, March considered the relationships between exploration of new ways of doing things and the exploitation of accepted, standard practices for organizational learning.Read More

12: On the Value of Conferences — Emma Bell and Paul Duguid LIVE

Dmitrijs and Ralph are joined by Professors Paul Duguid and Emma Bell to talk about the value and form of conferences in promoting, disseminating and facilitating knowledge. The four of us shared some personal conference-attending experiences, considered the current format and emergent alternatives, and pondered on the nature of knowledge as such. Read More