As suggested above, we are using the term ‘watershed’ to indicate a significant turning-point in the development of the subject area. In making sense of key watersheds we need to take account of (a) the absolute frequency of citation, (b) the timing of each publication, (c) the topic of the paper that does the citing, and (d) the text in which the citation is embedded. Given the natural tendency of academics to cite more recent work, there is a good case for giving extra weight to some of the older works which have been cited, especially where they are identified by authors working in different fields.
On this basis we may identify three main groups of literature as the timeline moves forward: (i) classic works that pre-date the identification of the ideas of organizational learning and knowledge management per se, (ii) foundational works which represent some of the first writings that set the agenda for subsequent work, and (iii) popularizing works which have acted as the most visible watersheds in the development of the field. It is important to note in passing that we do not regard the third term as being in any way pejorative; indeed, some of the ‘popularizing’ works were highly scholarly and all of them managed to generate streams of extremely valuable work. It is not possible to give single time-bands within which the three groups of literature appeared because different sub-areas have emerged at different times and at different rates; hence, the relevant watersheds come at slightly different times. We start with classic works which are presented for the whole field; we then consider separately the time lines within each of the four sub-areas defined at the outset of this chapter.
Classic works
Here we identify four main authors who have had a significant influence and who were active before the earliest mentions of terms such as organizational learning appeared: John Dewey, Michel Polanyi, Edith Penrose, and Frederick Hayek. They are not the most frequently cited in the present volume, partly because they have been overlaid by more recent authors (and as academics we are encouraged to focus more on recent publications than on classic works). Nevertheless, each of them has a substantial rating in the ISI Web of Science (running to several thousand for Dewey, Polanyi, and Hayek). We comment briefly here on their contributions primarily in the light of chapters within this Handbook, and in a few cases we will also refer to other key works in the field, including those listed in Table 1.1.
Dewey is the only one of these authors who explicitly focused his attention on learning. His ideas of learning from experience fit most easily into models of individuals’ learning within organizations, and the notion of iterations between experience and reflection is frequently seen to underlie action learning, which is one of the key tools of the learning organization (Pedler, Boydell, and Burgoyne, 1989). Dewey’s view that learning takes place through social interaction and yet cannot be passed from person to person as if it were a physical object is also seen to underlie the social learning perspective (Brandi and Elkjaer, Chapter 2). Other authors who take a social constructionist approach to organizational knowledge (Cook and Brown, 1999; Nicolini and Meznar, 1995; Shipton and DeFillippi, Chapter 4) follow Dewey’s ideas, while Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) acknowledge the impact of his philosophical contribution to ‘pragmatism’ in asserting that there cannot be a clear distinction between the observer and the observed.
Polanyi is best known for his distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge. The key idea of ‘tacitness’ has parallels to Dewey’s experiential learning, because it is something that is held within the individual. Naturally, there are many different interpretations of what this all means. One version of tacit knowledge is that it is conscious, but not articulated; another version is that it is unconscious and hence inarticulable, as Tsoukas discusses (Chapter 21). Polanyi’s ideas are based on philosophical analysis and argument, rather than on any empirical investigation, and of course, some would argue that the notion of tacit knowledge cannot be examined empirically because it is unconscious.
The influence of Polanyi is most evident in contemporary discussions about the nature of organizational knowledge. The idea of tacit knowledge is important for those trying to understand the roots of competitive advantage because it is the unexpressed knowledge and experiences of organizations which provide the unique competencies that cannot be easily replicated by competitors (Barney, 1991). While tacit knowledge may give unique advantages to a company, it also poses problems because it cannot easily be moved across cultural boundaries (Taylor and Osland, Chapter 26), nor is it easy to move between different parts of the same organization (Argote, Denomme, and Fuchs, Chapter 29).
Penrose is cited less frequently, but her ideas on the significance of the internal (human) resources of the firm are fundamental, and as she puts it: ‘the dominant role that increasing knowledge plays in economic processes’ (1959: 77). Penrose proposes the importance of ‘excess resources’ within an organization which can lead to innovation, paralleling the need for slack to allow experimentation. There are many other points made by Penrose which mirror those made both by her contemporaries and by recent authors. Thus, in discussing the role of top teams she comments: ‘the administrative group is more than a collection of individuals; it is a collection of individuals who have had experience in working together, for only in this way can teamwork be developed’ (1959: 46). And ‘success depends upon a gradual building up of a group of officials’ experiences in working together’ (1959: 52). These views anticipate the ideas of social constructionists who emphasize that organizations know more than the sum of the knowledge of individuals within them; they also emphasize the role of experience and the fact that ‘Knowledge comes from formal teaching and from personal experience’ (1959: 53), which is very close to the distinction that Polanyi was developing at the same time between explicit and personal (tacit) knowledge.
It is not surprising that the work of Hayek is seen to underlie the thinking of those who adopt an economics perspective on organizational learning and knowledge. In particular, his view that one of the fundamental problems of economics is to use the knowledge initially dispersed around different individuals in a way that contributes to producing good decisions for the organization or society as a whole (see, Foss and Mahnke, Chapter 7). But he has also had a wider influence, possibly because his 1945 paper was extensively quoted by March and Simon (1958). Here, the emphasis that he places on the knowledge held by individuals naturally focuses attention on ‘the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place’ (Hayek, 1945: 80), which may be seen to anticipate the current attention given to ‘situated’ knowledge. Moreover, it starts to provide a methodological justification for the use of qualitative methods which are sensitive to contextual factors, such as narrative method, in trying to understand processes of organizational learning (see Bettis, Wong, and Blettner, Chapter 17, and Hayes, Chapter 5).
Not only are the contributions of these four authors still recognized by contemporary scholars, but we can also see that their ideas overlapped with each other in several respects. But all of their work contributed to early work in the management field as well as to the invention of the concept of organizational learning.
Organizational learning
The idea that an organization could learn and knowledge could be stored over time was the key breakthrough, which was first articulated in the book by Cyert and March (1963). Evidently the book was the product of much discussion and debate which had been going on among the team at Carnegie Tech during the 1950s (Augier, 2001) and it was foreshadowed, but not explicitly, by March and Simon (1958). Cyert and March propose a general theory of organizational learning as part of a model of decision making within the firm, and emphasize the role of rules, procedures, and routines in response to external shocks and which are more or less likely to be adopted according to whether or not they lead to positive consequences for the organization. A number of specific ideas were outlined in their book, which were subsequently developed further by other scholars. Noteworthy points in the book are: the idea that it is through ‘organizational learning processes (that) . . . the firm adapts to its environment’ (1963: 84); the view that ‘the firm learns from its experience’ (1963: 100); and an early version of the distinction between single and double-loop learning, to wit, ‘An organization . . . changes its behavior in response to short-run feedback from the environment according to some fairly well-defined rules. It changes rules in response to longer-run feedback according to some more general rules, and so on’ (1963: 101/2).
Cyert and March’s book is often described as the foundational work of organizational learning, but others made fundamental contributions in the early days as well. Cangelosi and Dill (1965) produced the first publication in which the words ‘organizational learning’ appeared in the title, and although the paper is based on tendentious data, it already makes a distinct contribution to debates in the field because it starts to argue against the rationality of assumptions underlying the Cyert and March model. It is suggested that the model may be appropriate for established organizations in stable circumstances, but it has limited relevance to organizations developing within dynamic circumstances. Thus, Cangelosi and Dill propose a model based on tensions between individual and organizational levels of learning, which is similar to the notion of organizational learning being a discontinuous process (Argyris and Schön, 1978).
The book by Argyris and Schön (1978) was very important since it laid out the field as a whole very clearly, and their distinction between organizations with and without the capacity to engage in significant learning (Models II and I) received a great deal of attention. In it, the authors take a different critique of the assumptions of Cyert and March by pointing out that human behavior within organizations frequently does not follow the lines of economic rationality. Both individuals and organizations seek to protect themselves from the unpleasant experience of learning by establishing defensive routines. During the 1970s and 1980s there were a number of other foundational works, such as Hedberg (1981), Shrivastra (1983), Daft and Weick (1984), and Fiol and Lyles (1985), which made important contributions to the definitions of terminology, and to deeper perspectives on organizational learning, such as the distinction between learning and unlearning.
Perhaps the most significant popularizing force in the study of organizational learning was the publication of the Special Edition of Organization Science in 1991. This contains a number of highly cited articles including March (1991), Huber (1991), Epple, Argote and Devadas (1991), and Simon (1991). These have been very influential, and set the academic research agenda for much of the 1990s. They follow, in the main, the Carnegie tradition which suggests that it is desirable to maximize the efficient use of knowledge in organizations, while recognizing that there are substantial, largely human, antecedents. Many of the chapters in the current volume build explicitly upon their foundations (for example, van Wijk, van den Bosch, and Volberda, Chapter 13; and Teece, Chapter 23).
However, it is also interesting that the same issue of Organization Science included a paper by Brown and Duguid (1991) which has come to represent an alternative tradition that regards the social processes of organizational learning as pre-eminent. This tradition has also been developed through the work of Nicolini and Meznar (1995), Wenger (1998), Brown and Duguid (2000, 2001), and Gherardi (2006). In the current volume it is evident that it underpins the work of authors such as Hayes (Chapter 5), Gherardi (Chapter 4), Taylor and Osland (Chapter 26), von Krogh (Chapter 19), and Plaskoff (Chapter 10). From the early 1990s these two traditions, emphasizing either the efficiency or the social processes of organizational learning, have developed largely independently and have had increasing difficulty in communicating with each other. One of our aims in both editions of this Handbook has been to provide good coverage of both traditions in order to facilitate dialogue and better mutual understanding between the two.
The learning organization
The idea of the learning organization is of more recent provenance. It emerged towards the end of the 1980s largely on the basis of European work, with UK authors such as Garratt (1987) and Pedler, Boydell, and Burgoyne (1989) making early contributions, although the paper by de Geus (1988), which was published in the Harvard Business Review, brought the concept to wider attention. Nevertheless, the major watershed was the book by Senge (1990) which attracted enormous interest particularly because companies and consultants were searching for new ideas to replace the largely discredited concepts of corporate excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982). Senge’s book was both a foundational work and a popularizer because it rapidly became a key source for academics as well as an inspiration for practitioners. His ideas were highly attractive because they provided the potential for renewal and growth, with an underpinning of both technical and social ideas drawn respectively from the systems dynamics developed by Jay Forrester at MIT, the psycho-dynamic organizational theory developed by Chris Argyris, and process consultation of Ed Schein.
Despite the huge success of Senge’s initial book, his perspective has not been widely adopted by the North American academic community (see Calhoun, Starbuck, and Abrahamson, Chapter 11),1 and it has continued to be primarily a practitioner affair (for example, Swieringa and Wierdsma, 1992; Burgoyne, Pedler, and Boydell, 1994; Örtenblad, 2004; Yeo, 2005). The few academics who write in the USA on this issue, for example, Dixon (1994) and Torbert (1994), are often influenced by European ideas, such as the work of Revans (1980) on Action Learning. In the present volume, diBella (Chapter 9) provides valuable updating and development of the concepts related to the learning organization by proposing a more flexible method than that originally laid down by Senge. Plaskoff (Chapter 10) describes strategies for implementing learning in organizations using ideas drawn from the communities of practice literature, and Roloff, Woolley, and Edmondson (Chapter 12) stress the importance of evaluating the contribution of teams.
Early critical work (Coopey, 1995; Coopey and Burgoyne, 2000; Snell and Chak, 1998) raised a number of concerns about the learning organization, including charges that it was politically naïve, contained an ideology that was exploitative of employees, and that it was not necessarily transferable to other cultural contexts. While not necessarily against the idea of the learning organization, later authors stressed that theories and practices needed to include ideas such as power, politics, and culture (Lawrence, et al., 2005; Simm, 2009), and the lack of clear links to business success (Thomas and Allen, 2006). Calhoun, Starbuck, and Abrahamson (Chapter 11) also point to the difficulty in demonstrating the benefits of the learning organization and discuss how it can be seen as part of the wider rise and fall of management ideas.
Organizational knowledge
Organizational knowledge as a subject of study has been around for a long time, but primarily within the economics community. Thus, as we have noted above, the ‘classical’ influence of economists such as Hayek and Penrose, and the philosopher Polanyi, has been significant. One of the major foundational works, also from an economics perspective, is Nelson and Winter (1982), which is particularly strong on the importance of ‘tacit knowing’ as a basis for individual and organizational competence. Other foundational works emerged in the early 1990s, especially from two Special Issues of the Journal of Management Studies on knowledge work (Alvesson, 1993; Starbuck, 1992, 1993); the elaboration of six different forms of organizational knowing by Blackler (1995) was also an important foundational work.
But the key popularizing influence was Ikujiro Nonaka who produced a series of papers and a highly respected book (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) that set the standard for the emergent field with a rich mixture of concepts and field data. Key ideas expounded in the book include: the notion of knowledge creation through transformations of tacit and explicit knowledge; the importance of national culture and philosophy for understanding the construction and communication of knowledge; the interrelationship between the policy domain and the operational levels in the creation of knowledge; and the general principle that most dichotomies, such as tacit/explicit and mind/body, are false.
Given the importance of Nonaka’s work, it is to be expected that he should attract his share of criticism. For example, there are suggestions that he misunderstands the nature of tacit knowledge, that his methodology is flawed and that his theory is not adequately supported by the evidence available (Gourlay, 2006). Nonaka has responded robustly to these criticisms through both restating the main principles of his theory and introducing new research results (Nonaka, von Krogh, and Voelpel, 2006; Nonaka and von Krogh, 2009).
In the background, the influence of Polanyi remains strongly evident in the works of dominant figures like Nelson and Winter (1982) and Nonaka; his ideas are also central to debates about the nature of organizational knowledge (Spender, 1996) in this Handbook by von Krogh (Chapter 19) and Tsoukas (Chapter 21). But it is also possible to see the influence of Hayek and other neo-classical economists in Nonaka’s discussion about the problem of resolving the perspectives of the policy and operational domains, which can be solved, Nonaka argues, through the process of knowledge conversion.
Knowledge management
The idea of knowledge management arrived only in the mid 1990s, and is still developing (Alavi and Denford, Chapter 6). Its early evolution was rapid and chaotic, even though it has settled down with some distinctive themes over the last decade. To some extent, knowledge management gained academic legitimacy on the back of Nonaka’s work; the driving force in the corporate world, however, has come from major consultancy companies seeking to capitalize on the enormous potential of information technology in a period following disenchantment with the methods and prescriptions of re-engineering (Hammer and Champy, 1993; Grint and Case, 1998). The idea is pretty simple, since it starts with the neo-economic view of the strategic value of organizational knowledge and then uses familiar IT software such as databases and electronic conferencing to facilitate the acquisition, sharing, storage, retrieval, and utilization of knowledge. As such, the conceptual logic follows the technical view of organizational learning as expounded by Huber (1991).
Early critiques of knowledge management initiatives were made on the grounds that they ignore the social architecture of knowledge exchange within organizations (Hansen, Nohria, and Tierney, 1999), and it is not surprising that some of these came from the ‘social’ school of organizational learning theorists (for example, Brown and Duguid, 2000). In a practical sense the social perspective has adapted technologies from elsewhere (such as Facebook) into the organizational context which enables flexible communication and sharing of supposedly tacit knowledge between members (McAfee, 2006). These technologies are also being applied to the absorption of external knowledge through, for example, the creation of online user communities who provide feedback on existing products and generate new ideas for innovation (Di Ganji et al., 2010). Alavi and Denford (Chapter 6) and Hayes (Chapter 5) review the development of social networking technology over the last decade and point to some of the limitations. Some of the other chapters also discuss the role of technology in knowledge sharing, storage, and databases (see Argote, Denomme, and Fuchs, Chapter 29; Ahuja and Novelli, Chapter 25).