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Facilitating learning organizations: Making learning count
By Victoria J. Marsick & Karen E. Watkins Aldershot Gower. 1999. Hardback, L45. ISBN 0-5660-8039-7.
Since the late 1970s, the concepts of `organizational learning' and `the learning organization' have become increasingly influential as ways of examining and prescribing how organizations might respond to contemporary economic and social conditions. These conditions are said to be ones where the rates of change faced by organizations are increasing through the advent of globalization, information technology and the importance of knowledge as a source of competitive advantage. Heralded by titles such as the `information age', `post-industrial society', the `global economy' and the `knowledge economy', these new conditions have become an important influence on the way organizations are managed. Organizations must continually be able to learn and adapt in order to survive and prosper and it is in this context that Marsick and Watkins' latest book, Facilitating learning organizations, is written. Their response is to add to the already large literature on organizational learning by providing guidance and advice on how to implement change interventions that will create organizations equipped to learn and respond to the changes they continually face.
Marsick and Watkins develop their own model of the `Learning Organization' which is then reviewed in terms of various case studies and examples. The model suggests to readers how they too might develop their own companies into learning organizations. In providing these case studies and examples, Marsick and Watkins draw on a number of organizational practitioners to share their experience of `facilitating learning organizations'. An important contribution of the book is that it integrates the concepts of the `learning organization' with that of `knowledge management' and develops and illustrates a model of how the two interrelated concepts can be used to manage organizations. In doing so, the book is addressed primarily to practitioners and is used to provide advice and examples of how Marsick and...