Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Introduction

Practice perspectives are inscribed mainly within a sociological approach to organizational learning and knowing that considers knowledge as something that people do together. Knowing and doing are therefore inextricably entangled.

While psychological approaches are better known and have founded, for better or worse, the interpretative model of organizational learning (see the critique of Weick, 1991; and Chapter 1 in this Handbook) sociological perspectives have been slower to establish themselves. The sociological contribution to the study of organizational learning (Gherardi and Nicolini, 2001) can be summarized in the terms of an invitation to view organizational learning from a cultural perspective as a metaphor (derived from the juxtaposition of the two terms ‘learning’ and ‘organization’) that makes it possible to develop a system of representation (a theory) with which to interpret organizing as if it were a learning process. Therefore, identifiable within studies on organizational learning are various narratives concerning what constitutes that relationship and how it can be understood. The sociological concepts that have contributed most to the understanding of organizational learning have been first that of learning as participation, then of reflexivity as a dynamic of social reproduction, and, more recently, that of practice. And it is on this last concept that I shall concentrate in what follows.

Studies on organizational learning and knowing have re-appropriated ...