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Conference Summary
Table of Contents
Introduction
About the Event
What is Organizational Learning?
Defining a Need
New Thinking
Cause and Effect
Theory to Practice
Between Three Worlds
Learning in the Private Sector
Learning in the Public Sector
Learning in the Academic Sector
Opportunities for Cross-Pollination?
Case in Point
Reconsidering the Variables
Diversity and Conflict
Learning with Power
Learning with Emotion
Learning Fashions
Learning from the Past and Future
Architecture for Learning
Organizational Theater
About the Author
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Applying the theories of organizational learning to actual institutions and
communities continues to be a frustrating proposition, even for institutions
of “higher learning.”
This was underscored by the messages emerging from the workshop on learning
in academic institutions, led by Prof. Gert Asmuss of the Tuck School
of Management and Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Prof. Björn
Wittrock of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social
Sciences, and Konrad Schily, who is Deputy Chairman of the Board at
the University of Witten-Herdecke in Germany. These main messages were:
first, that the institutions created for learning appear to have the hardest
time learning themselves; second, that these institutions tend to pile new
knowledge on top of existing knowledge and expand curricula rather than
consciously engaging in unlearning; and third, that academics tend not to
study academic organizations, so we still know too little about it.
Consider for example, the social science community, says
Prof. Neil
Smelser, former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California. Modeled after natural sciences
such as Newtonian physics or functional biology, the social sciences should
theoretically be engaged in a quest for general laws and scientific unity.
“Instead however, proliferation and specialization have always increased,
dispersing and fragmenting knowledge,” says Smelser. In fact, he points out,
social scientists have proven so good at self-promotion through topicality
and controversy that they are constantly creating new schools of thought
that add much to the agglomeration of knowledge but do little to build
consensus. The result is high-quality research, but hopelessly splintered
and mutually incomprehensible sub-communities at every turn. In the extreme,
the politics of learning in organizations take on the characteristics of
religious analogies, full of issues of faith, orthodoxy, sectarian conflict
and schisms. |
