Hi Steve Eskow,
In a message dated 12/8/97 10:21:57 AM EST, you write:
> So it may be useful to stop from time to time and remind ourselves that
> organizations aren't really alive and can't really do all the things
> that people do.
> So: a basketball team isn't a living being, but a rule-governed group of
> living beings engaged in a certain game . >>
Great stuff Steve!
Karl Weick, one of the leading organizational behavior thinkers sees this
distinction very clearly. He wrote an entire book (The Social Psychology
of Organizing) without mentioning "learning" once.
In his view individuals learn and organizations may embody the results of
that learning, but organizations don't learn in precisely the same way as
individuals. His argument runs like this:
In Stimulus-Response terms (S-R) we can construct a 2X2 matrix with four
cells:
1. Same Stimulus followed by Same Response = Repetition
2. Same Stimulus followed by Different Response = Learning
3. Different Stimulus followed by Same Response = Generalization
4. Different Stimulus followed by Different Response = Improvisation
Individual learning is normally thought of as a Cell 2 phenomenon. But
behavior in organizations often falls into Cells 3 or 1. Even when it
falls into Cell 2, Weick points out that there may be non-learning
explanations (See "The Nontraditional Quality of Organizational Learning"
Organization Science Vol.2 No.1, Feb. 1991).
In addition, in complex systems in real world situations one can argue
whether any stimulus and any response are ever the same. (As Cratylus put
it "You can never step into the same river once") All of which makes the
deceptively simple idea of organizational learning rather complicated!
Best wishes,
David Hurst
--DHurst1046 <DHurst1046@aol.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>