The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the status of, and highlight the trends in, Organizational Learning research. The EBSCO database is used to search articles and papers and these are then analyzed on a number of parameters. These include types of research methodology used, the purpose the papers serve, the areas covered by the papers, most frequently cited papers and most influential authors. The paper extends the work of Crossan and Guatto (1996). It furnishes information that fulfills the `information need' of researchers, and provides a starting point for those entering Organizational Learning (OL) research for the first time.
Today, we live and work in knowledge economy, an economy that works very differently
from the agricultural and industrial economies that the world has faced in the past.
Knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, is more difficult to imitate, duplicate or acquire
and thus approximates closely an ideal asset. The businesses realize this fact and
increasingly deploy strategies to exploit these qualities to gain long-term sustainable
competitive advantage. Knowledge is an outcome of learning. In this context, it becomes
imperative that organizations understand learning processes well. For centuries, individual
learning has been studied from psychological, social and anthropological perspectives
and there exist several theories on this subject. However, the concept of Organizational
Learning (referred to as OL) is relatively new in the sense that most of the research has
happened only in the last two decades and any stable theory has yet to evolve. OL can
be defined as the process of social construction of meaning by the members of an
organization, from data and information that exists in the internal and external environment
of an organization.
The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic review of work done in the field
of OL. This analysis also helps in identifying the areas where future research in OL could
be focused.
To achieve this objective, it is necessary to identify the distinct streams of thoughts
and trace them through the literature on OL research. This will help diagnose gaps in
buildup of OL research, i.e., ideas that yet need in-depth exploration as opposed to ideas
that appear saturated with bulk of publications. For this purpose, we propose to track
the history of OL research right from its origins. The data on OL research for this paper
is obtained from the EBSCO database. |
