Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Introduction

Since the turn of the century, interest in diverse forms of inter-organizational relationships has proliferated in practice as well as in the most prestigious outlets for management studies. As the lowering of trade and investment barriers coincided with widespread access to ever cheaper and more sophisticated means of control, coordination, and communication (Friedman, 2006), many businesses and entrepreneurs have taken advantage of these changes to create more far-flung and complex supply chains, geographically dispersed teams, and network firms. Recent research has emphasized the importance of understanding the structural position of firms in inter-organizational networks (such as in the case with supply chains) and what sorts of structural arrangements encourage or impede knowledge transfer (Easterby-Smith, Lyles, and Tsang, 2008). Moreover, contemporary research that looks more closely at intraorganizational versus inter-organizational learning, frequently does so in order to link it explicitly to innovation and the creation and sustaining of firm capabilities (Hult, Ketchun, and Arrfelt, 2007; Easterby-Smith et. al., 2008).

This context creates a challenge for management scholars to redress the limits of theoretical and empirical understanding about structuring and the processes internal to an organization that foster taking both internally and externally generated knowledge and combining these to exploit current performance strengths or create new ones. The ...