1st Edition

Beyond the Learning Organisation Paths of Organisational Learning in the East German Context

By Mike Geppert Copyright 2000
    210 Pages
    by Routledge

    This title was first published in 2000. In contemporary management literature, the idea that managers and organizations should learn and provide widespread capabilities for learning to learn is gaining popularity. Some see reflexive thinking and learning as being the proper response to the transformation of industrial society. However, this study is not concerned too much with the reasons for learning, but is more about how actors and groups of actors actually learn and the resources at their disposal for learning. The study aims to show that differences in social context do matter, and analyzes the organizational learning process in the political and social transformation of East Germany.

    Theories of organizational learning, institutional settings and enactment - introduction, the roots of organizational learning in organization theory, the idea of organizational learning, learning revisited, towards an analysis of organizational learning processes in different social contexts; research design, company cases and methods of investigation - introduction, research interests, preparatory and selection phase, intensive research phase, phase of analysis, concluding comments; trajectories of learning in three East German companies - case study A-integration in a large industrial group, case study B-searching for a market niche, case study C-the creation of new markets; a systematic comparison of the cases - introduction, summary; intertwining organizational learning and institutional settings - introduction, institutional tensions in processes of organizational learning and their impact on the micro-macro problem, dissimilarities in the social construction of cultural systems and their impact on the micro-macro problem, concluding remarks and outlook.

    Biography

    Mike Geppert