Toward an organizational learning model for bureaucratic organizations : a strategic management perspective

Abstract

This dissertation explores the development of organizational learning activities in bureaucratic organizations. Its central question is "How do bureaucracies learn?" In order to answer this question, three phases seem to be necessary. The first phase provides an extensive review of the organizational learning literature. Eight learning models are examined, articulated, and used to suggest a preliminary model for learning in bureaucracies. The model postulates three interrelated processes that reflect on-going dilemmas for bureaucracies. These dilemmas can be summarized in terms of bureaucracies' ability: to manage their relations with their environments; to establish and maintain their interpretation systems; and to manipulate their internal structures for learning purposes. The combination of these variables allows us to consider and synthesize a wide range of variables that together can explain a great portion of learning in bureaucracies. In the second phase the proposed model is used as a conceptual framework to evaluate learning activities as they actually occur in the United States Postal Service (USPS). Most of the learning activities that the USPS has engaged in since the passage of the Postal Reorganizational Act (PRA) of 1970 are analyzed. The third phase is a synthesis of both the theoretical and empirical findings that is intended to provide an integrated schema of organizational learning in bureaucracies. The study utilizes an exploratory method of a single organization. The chosen methodology provides the researcher with an opportunity to give a first exposition of a wide range of variables that might have positive or negative impacts on the development of learning processes in bureaucracies. Finally, it is suggested that future research focus should be shifted toward the development of an understanding of how bureaucracies can stimulate, rather than impede, learning. Such an understanding should be grounded in specific assumptions about a bureaucracy's meanings, designs, and functions.