Seeing Organizational Learning: A `Cultural' View

Abstract

What sight does a `cultural' approach to organizational learning enable? In an earlier essay my co-author and I argued that such an approach made it possible to bypass certain conceptual problems inherent in treating organizational learning as an attribute of individuals. In this essay I reflect on the metaphoric process that enabled that argument, which was implicitly as much methodological as it was ontological and epistemological, and spell out the attributes of such an approach, which today I would term `interpretive'. I touch briefly on questions of organizational size and geographic dispersal raised by another field-based study and conclude with a brief comparison of `culture' with `communities of practice', both of which enable a collective approach, and with some observations on the implications of a cultural-interpretive approach for research methods.