If we start with the four terms in Figure 1.1, although all of them are relatively new, some are newer than others. Thus, the idea of knowledge management only emerged in the mid-1990s, whereas the first references to organizational learning appeared as far back as the early 1960s (Cyert and March, 1963; Cangelosi and Dill, 1965). But all four areas draw on literature and ideas that are older than their immediate concerns, and in a number of places there are overlaps between these initial sources.
Moreover, the field as a whole has been characterized by sudden surges of interest in particular topics, often followed soon after by rapid decline. (See Calhoun, Starbuck, and Abrahamson, Chapter 11, for further discussion of fads and fashions). These surges can often be explained by the changes in the business or technological environment. But literature also plays a significant part, and a number of books or papers have managed to capitalize on latent interest which then creates a major sub-industry in its own right. One obvious example is the book by Peter Senge (1990) which is one of the most cited texts in this volume. Although Senge was not the first person to coin the term ‘learning organization,’ it was the publication of his book which led to international awareness of the learning organization across both academic and practitioner communities. Thereafter, many large companies started claiming they were learning organizations, or that they were aspiring to this status; academics rushed to identify the characteristics of learning organizations, or to critique and deconstruct the very concept. As such, the publication of Senge’s book represents a watershed, in the same way that Peters and Waterman (1982) represented a watershed for academics, consultants, and practitioners in the previous decade.
Our aim now is to examine systematically the chapters in this book to see if there are patterns and trends that can be discerned. We do this by first looking at the citations that predate 2000, where the content of the item has some relevance to the fields of organizational learning and management. Then we look at citations to papers that appeared from 2000 onwards. This gives an indication of the rises and falls in the influence of different authors over the last decade.
In Table 1.1 we list the authors of books or papers according to how many of the chapters in this Handbook have cited them. For each cited work we give the author names and date, but we do not provide full bibliographical details at the end of this chapter because all are cited in subsequent chapters.
There are a few points to note about this table. First, the list provides most of the names one would expect to see. If we take the total number of citations for authors, then the leading figures in the field are March, Nonaka, Argyris, Senge, Szulanski, and Huber, along with the pairs of Lave and Wenger, Brown and Duguid, Nelson and Winter, Cohen and Levinthal, Cook and Brown, and Kogut and Zander. Second, the dominance of the top publications is balanced by considerable diversity once one gets down to the level of detail. Thus, although the top ten were cited repeatedly, nearly half of the papers were only cited once or twice. This is because many of the authors are working in specialist areas, which have limited overlap with others.
A comparison between the present analysis and the same analysis conducted for the first edition shows that these classics of the learning literature are still important, but that their relative influence has diminished somewhat. Thus Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), Brown and Duguid (1991), Huber (1991), Kogut and Zander (1992), and Nelson and Winter (1982) are still there, but a few other papers have grown in significance, notably Lave and Wenger (1991), Teece, Pisano, and Shuen (1997), and Wenger (1998).
Table 1.2, which covers the period from 2000–2010 provides an indication of trends in the field since the first edition was written. It shows the continuing dominance of some established scholars, notably Nonaka, and Brown and Duguid, but also the rise of some new stars including Argote and Ingram, Gherardi, von Krogh, Carlile, and Orlikowski. The topics covered by these authors demonstrate the growing interest in organizational knowledge creation and the social processes underlying organizational learning and knowledge.