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Organizations as Knowledge Systems: Knowledge, Learning, and Dynamic Capabilities Haridimos Tsoukas and Nikolaos Mylonopoulos Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke, UK December 2003 328 pp. 1403911401 £55 Hardback
Keywords Learning, Intellectual capital, Knowledge management, Organizational change
Review DOI 10.1108/01437730510607907
This book is based on papers from the Third European Conference on Organizational Knowledge, Learning, and Capabilities in Athens, April 2002. The organizational capability to communicate, share, learn and develop knowledge was a core theme of the conference, which has largely been reflected in the essays that comprise the book.
Viewing an organization as a knowledge system implies simultaneous concern with three issues: how individuals exercise their judgements and create new knowledge, how collective domains of action are sustained and particular values and beliefs within them become institutionalized, and how particular sets of generalizations and abstract statements are selected, institutionalized and modified.
The book is in three parts, containing 12 essays. Part 1: Organizational Knowing and Learning, examines some issues in organizational learning, especially on what makes such learning possible/impossible. In one of the four essays, Chris Argyris, of double-loop learning fame, examines the defensive routines that are active both in the organizations being studied and in the academic community undertaking the study. Why is single-loop learning still so prevalent? The argument put forward is that scholars seek to produce valid, generalisable knowledge, where validity is assessed solely by deriving hypotheses and testing them empirically. This describes the status quo (single-loop): scholars fail to generate actionable knowledge (double-loop). Knowledge claims may have internal and external validity, and yet be lacking in implementability.
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