Chapter 1

The Evolving Field of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management

MARK EASTERBY-SMITH AND MARJORIE A. LYLES

Organizational learning (OL) and knowledge management (KM) research has gone through dramatic changes in the last twenty years and, without doubt, the field will continue to change in the next ten years. Our research suggests that Cyert and March were the first authors to reference organizational learning in their publication of 1963. It was just twenty years ago that a conference was held at Carnegie Mellon University to honor March and his contribution to the field of organizational learning. Many of these presentations were published in a special issue of Organization Science in 1991.

Since that time we have seen a rapid expansion in the number of journal articles—both academic and practitioner—devoted to organizational learning. Fields such as information technology, marketing and human resources have also jumped on the bandwagon. Doctoral programs are including seminars on organizational learning, and MBA courses on organizational learning are appearing. All of this reflects acceptance of the concept that organizations have knowledge, do learn over time, and consider their knowledge base and social capital as valuable assets. It also reaffirms the legitimacy of research on organizational learning and its practical applications to organizations.

The first edition of this Handbook was published in 2003 but most chapters were completed in 2001 or 2002. Our first edition was widely used and it was clear—given the advancement of the field—that a second edition was necessary. Some people might claim that it is foolhardy to seek to cover the full range of the literature within one volume. Our intent is to provide a resource that is useful to academics, practitioners, and students who want an overview of the current field with full recognition that—to our delight—the field continues to have major impact on research and management practices. Our response is to highlight four features of the current literature, which provide a general rationale for compiling this Handbook.

First is the novelty and speed of development of the field. Overall, there was very little activity before 1990, and in some sub-areas almost everything dates after 1995. The speed of development, coupled with the lead times of publishing, means it is hard to develop a cumulative sense to the field where studies and publications are able to build systematically on previous work. Many of the chapter authors show how the present position has evolved from prior work, and then proceed to speculate on potential future directions (for example, see Argote, Denomme, and Fuchs, Chapter 29; and Van Wijk, van den Bosch, and Volberda, Chapter 22).

The second feature is the increasing diversity and specialization of the field. This has led to tighter definitions and the isolation of problems such as the political implications of organizational learning and knowledge management; it has also led to developments taking place in parallel which result in limited awareness of what is happening elsewhere at the same time. There is therefore a need to locate different sub-areas in relation to each other, so that overlaps and potential areas of synergy can be identified. In preparing the chapters of this book the authors have been aware of topics of other chapters and had access to the chapter drafts so that they could also identify potential commonalities and differences, whether there are overlaps of subject material, similar theoretical roots, or shared problem areas. This also implies a need for some mapping exercises, and several of the chapters (in addition to this one) aim to do just that (for example, see Shipton and DeFillippi, Chapter 4; and Vera, Crossan, and Apaydin, Chapter 8).

The third feature is that debates and arguments have started to flourish largely as a consequence of this diversity. Debates have focused around the definition of terms and the meaning of concepts, the appropriateness of methods of inquiry, ways of influencing learning processes within organizations, and the purposes to which we should put our knowledge of organizational learning and knowledge management. Because they lead to clarification of terms, sharpening of distinctions, and development of new ideas, these debates are invaluable. Consequently, we have encouraged authors to identify ongoing debates in their areas; and in a number of places we have juxtaposed chapters that represent different perspectives on particular contemporary debates.

Fourth, despite the growing diversity we have also been surprised at the number of citations that appear repeatedly across the chapters of the Handbook, which suggests that there still remains considerable commonality in the field. If we reach back to some of the earlier papers, there are several common points of departure, which may have become a form of ‘tacit knowledge’ that underlies the work of most scholars. Accordingly we devote much of this chapter to looking at the sources of key concepts, and to the works that have had a disproportionate influence on the evolution of the field. We see these as being similar to the watersheds of rivers which provide essential starting points for distinct streams, but which may subsequently be forgotten as the downstream rivers gather both strength and importance.

This opening chapter has three main sections. In the first section we offer a preliminary mapping of the field that is covered by the Handbook, which is elaborated in the chapters that follow. In the second section we present an analysis of the citations given by the chapters in this Handbook. In order to give an indication of changing priorities since the first edition was published we have divided this into two separate tables: Table 1.1 covers the references that predate 2000 and Table 1.2 covers references after 2000. There are 1160 citations to work predating 2000 out of a total of over 2229 references across the twenty-nine chapters of the book. In the third section we develop the theme of watersheds by focusing on the older publications, some of which score well in our analysis of citations, and all of which appear to have had a significant impact on the evolution of the fields of organizational learning and knowledge management.

Table 1.1 References prior to 2000 most cited in this Handbook

Table 1.2 References for 2000–2010 cited in the Handbook