Seminar in Organizational Learning

Catalog description

This course examines processes of organizational learning. Learning, changing beliefs and efficacy in action, may be linked measures of progress and performance but presents a number of challenges. Performance is not always readily interpreted and the link between the actions an organization takes and proximate observable outcomes is often unclear and these measures may be loosely coupled to ultimate goals and interests. Organizations help facilitate coordinated actions among individuals and the outcomes that are realized by the organization are a function of those joint actions. However, these properties pose challenges for inferences around more or less desired action at both the individual and collective level, as well as divergent views as to what is in the individual and collective interest. Even if the organization does not face a conflict of interest among organizational members, it still faces a tension between the need to perform well in the near term, and exploit its current knowledge and bases of advantage, and to perform well over longer horizons, which may entail exploring other bases of action with which it is less familiar and perhaps less competent. However, performance itself can be a problematic construct --- different actors within the organization may have different views as to what goals or outcomes or more or less important, and even individual actors may face some degree of internal conflict over these issues. The contestation of goals and policy can take the form of organizational politics, where power, attention, and force of argument influence the playing out of this conflict. The last theme we consider is the challenge by which individual opinions and beliefs become aggregated to organizational level decisions and some of the learning challenges that this process of aggregation presents.