The Nature of Organizational Learning

To explore the interrelationship between organizational identity and learning more deeply, it is first necessary to articulate our perspective on the nature of organizational learning. Similar to our arguments that organizational identity is more than just a collective version of individual identity (Corley et al., 2000), we believe that some types of organizational learning are more than just a collective version of individual learning.

Weick (1991) clearly articulates the strength of this position in his assertion that depicting organizational learning as following the same processes as individual learning limits our ability to gain insight into the phenomenon as a distinctive process in its own right. In its essence, Weick’s argument contends that individual-level psychological theories of learning do not adequately describe the organizational learning process because the assumptions underlying those theories do not hold for organizations—organizations are a different type of entity than individuals and interact with environments differently than individuals. To depict organizations as learning the same way that individuals do results in an overly micro-centric view that does not do justice to the unique nature of organizational learning as a macro concept.

Weick and Westley (1999) further support this perspective in their citing of Normann’s (1985) and Argote and McGrath’s (1993) work. These researchers embed organizational learning in the practices and structures of groups rather than solely in the cognitions of individuals. Learning does not become a macro concept because groups (or in our case organizations) have cognitive structures like humans. Rather, it becomes a macro concept because learning is embedded in action and social interaction (see Ashforth, Rogers, and Corley, in press for a similar argument involving identity); in becoming a macro concept, these researchers argue that learning must transcend individual cognition.

Finally, our view of organizational learning is informed by Cook and Yanow’s (1993) conceptualization of organizational learning as a cultural process. Attempting to circumvent the problems they see with viewing organizations mainly as cognitive entities, Cook and Yanow examined the Powell Flute Company’s encounter with a technological change as an instance of organizational learning. The Powell Flute Company was world famous for making ‘the best flutes in the world’ using the Powell scale developed by the company’s founder. When a new, highly-demanded scale (the Cooper scale) was introduced, the members of the Powell Flute Company had to face questions about who they were and how that might change given the advent of this new scale. Essentially, they were faced with a question of identity: ‘Could the organization make a flute with a Cooper scale and still be the Powell organization?’ (1993: 383). Cook and Yanow focus on the organizational learning that occurs around this identity issue, especially on how the organization learns to ‘change without changing’ and bring the new scale in to their operations without disrupting their sense of collective identity.

What emerges from their analysis is a depiction of organizational learning as ‘the acquiring, sustaining, or changing of intersubjective meanings though the artifactual vehicles of their expression and transmission and the collective actions of the group’ (1993: 384). The crucial insight here is that organizational learning can involve ‘intersubjective meanings’ created and sustained via cultural practices—an insight that has been magnified in recent works by Carlile (2002) and Bechky (2003). Similar to Weick and Robert’s (1993) notion of collective mind embedded in group interaction, learning becomes collective when it is conceived at the level of social interaction, where ‘boundary objects’ such as language, symbols, and consensual practices (all supra-individual notions) facilitate the expression and transmission of shared understanding of actions and events throughout the organization.