Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Implications

The interrelationship between organizational identity and learning has a number of implications for organizations and for those of us studying them. Conceiving of organizational learning as occurring subtly, at a tacit level of collective awareness, affords researchers an opportunity to gain deeper insight into a diverse range of organizational phenomena. Some of the more relevant areas for this Handbook include conceptions of the ‘learning organization,’ leadership and organizational change, knowledge management, and the specification of the type of learning being examined in future conceptual and empirical work on the subject.

The learning organization

One of the clearest implications of this interrelationship is found in discussions of the ‘learning organization.’ As one might expect, the majority of definitions of the learning organization revolve around the management literature’s individualistic approach to explicit organizational learning. Thus, some of the more traditional definitions include Pedler, Boydell, and Burgoyne’s definition as ‘an organization which facilitates the learning of all of its members and continually transforms itself’ (1989: 2); Senge’s original definition as ‘organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together’ (1990: 3—see ...