Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Future Work and Conclusion

Organizational learning and knowledge transfer are central to the performance of organizations. The growing fragmentation and internationalization of productive activities, however, has led to new organizational forms whose geographic distribution poses challenges to organizational learning and knowledge transfer. While a wealth of literature has begun to blossom in this area over the past decade, understanding the impact of geographic dispersion on organizational learning and knowledge transfer poses unique challenges.

One particularly challenging aspect of this area of study is teasing apart the relative effects of different variables associated with geographic distribution and the organizational context. At the beginning of this chapter we presented a framework in which organizational learning begins with experience and ends with knowledge. National, technical, and social contexts moderate the relationship between organizational experience and knowledge. As we noted in the last section, however, there are interactions between the national, technical, and social contexts and a given geographically distributed project will have a particular combination of the three.

Beyond the interaction between contexts, however, studying organizational learning in a geographically distributed context also poses other challenges for teasing apart the relative effects of different dimensions of geographic distribution. In particular, geographic dispersion has several ...