Abstract
In what ways are organizational learning a relevant theoretical construct? The article taps into a debate on what is relevance to practitioners versus researchers’ responsibility. The publications on organizational learning are on the rise, but the patterns have changed and points to a bifurcation within the field of organizational learning. On one hand, organizational learning is a means to further organizational performance, a fixed goal to be measured, which sometimes demands unlearning. On the other hand, there is a call for organizational learning to be encompassing contemporary societal challenges like widespread digitalization, sustainable production, and an inclusive labor market. This may appear as a cleavage between immediate relevance to practitioners and researchers’ responsibilities for the development of relevant and critical knowledge. I propose to embrace a pragmatist theory of learning that can help address the unknown and include creative imagination directed toward developing an organizational learning field, which is also ready for the future.
Keywords
Introduction
This article is written as an inquiry into an emotion I had when participating in the annual Organizational Learning and Knowledge Capabilities (OLKC) conference in Bristol in 2019. 1 It was a sense of organizational learning (OL) as a vanishing field of interest to scholars. Looking 20 years back to the 3rd International Conference on Organizational Learning (OL) at Lancaster University in 1999, I remember a feeling of being part of a burgeoning research field. Although submitting papers and conference attendance cannot solely reflect the interest in a field, it may still be an indication of scholarly interest. Thus, for the 1999 conference, 102 papers were submitted (Easterby-Smith et al., 2000), whereas 93 papers were submitted to the 2019 OLKC conference. It may not appear as much of a decline in paper submissions, but the numbers should be seen against the background of a potentially larger community in 2019 than in 1999. In 2006, the OL conferences (which at some point in time had become the “Organizational Learning and Knowledge” conferences, OLK) merged with the knowledge management (KM) conferences on “Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Capabilities” (OKLC), which was first held in 2000 (Scarbrough et al., 2007). Today, the conferences are called “Organizational Learning and Knowledge Capabilities” (OLKC) and different universities and scholars in the United States and in Europe act as organizers. Not only is the potential OL community larger, the competitive edge around the OLKC conferences have also changed. In 1999, only 48 papers were selected for presentation whereas it was 84 in 2019 making the acceptance rate for presentations in 1999 47 percent and 90 percent in 2019.
Inspired by pragmatist philosophy (see, for example, Dewey, 1933 [1986], 1938 [1986]), I decided to make an inquiry into my hunch by asking: Is OL still a relevant theoretical construct? I thought it would be possible to confirm OL as a vanishing field through a decline in journal publications, but this proved to be wrong. On the contrary, publications on OL have had a steady increase over the years. It was, however, astounding to see that Management Learning (ML) recently had gone from being the top score to not even be among the top-10 outlets for articles on OL. The current main outlet is The Learning Organization (TLO). This called for a revision of my question, and I asked: In what ways are OL a relevant theoretical construct? This redefinition should be read against the background of both the “two defining characteristics” of articles published in ML, that is, that they should “engage in critique” and be “thought-provoking” (from ML “Notes for Contributors”) and a recent debate in ML. In this, Anderson et al. (2020) in their review of papers published in ML during the period 1994–2018 concluded that management and organization studies in general is of too little relevance to practitioners. They warned us about merely satisfying “our own intellectual curiosity and interest” (Anderson et al., 2020: 30). This made me wonder whether articles on OL are caught between the dilemma of being relevant to practitioners and a lack of critical touch and ability to provoke thought. Anderson et al. (2020), however, also deliberated upon what relevance to practice means and wrote that articles in ML should “provoke critical reflection that results in action and the
I addressed this latter question through a reading of publications in TLO to find out how scholars addressed the issue of OL. I also sent an email questionnaire to members of the Board behind the OLKC conferences and their recommended relevant colleagues to find out how they understand OL as a contemporary and future relevant theoretical construct. Briefly, I found that TLO publishes a fair number of articles that understands OL as a concept applied to increase organizational performance, a fixed goal to be measured and sometimes in need of unlearning. This is despite the current TLO editor’s encouragement to also include broader issues and to engage in critical perspectives on OL (Örtenblad, 2017). Overall, the answers to my email questionnaire were more critical toward the current and future value of OL as a theoretical construct and field of research. The answers, however, did not seem to question the relevance of the issue of learning, but asked for a field more inclusive of the current and future societal challenges.
In the following, I first introduce a brief history of the field, which may be represented as a bifurcation of functionalist and social constructionism, which is reflected in the theories on learning found in the literature on OL. Second, I introduce the methodologies and ways of interpreting the data. Third, I present the quantitative data demonstrating that OL is still a relevant theoretical construct in terms of numbers of journal publications. Fourth, I present my readings of TLO publications followed by an interpretation of the email questionnaire. Finally, I discuss the results of my findings and point toward the future of OL. In the discussion, I return to the debate on the dilemma between relevance to practitioners while maintaining OL as a critical and thought-provoking theoretical construct. I position the results of my research between a narrow versus a wider instrumentality and points to pragmatism as a theory of learning that may help cut across these two instrumentalities, because it is aimed at the development of imagination and creativity when working with OL in organizations.
Historical roots and theories of OL
The history on the issue of what is included in OL as a field of research and how to define OL as a theoretical construct has been discussed ever since the term OL saw daylight. This is not the place to do a genuine review, but very briefly it is possible to say that in the beginning, the term derived from decision theory (e.g. Cangelosi and Dill, 1965; Levitt and March, 1988; March and Olsen, 1979 [1994]) and management development (Argyris and Schön, 1978, 1996). Researchers were engaged in applying OL as an “actionable” theoretical construct to enhance management decisions and prevent organizational “errors” from having detrimental effects on organizations (see also Argyris, 2000, 2003; March, 1991). Later, the field was inspired to understand learning as participation in communities of practice (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Lave and Wenger, 1991), and OL was now not only including management, but organizations as a whole in which learning is an aspect of work and organizing (see also Cook and Yanow, 1993; Gherardi et al., 1998). The field matured and handbooks on OL were written (Dierkes et al., 2001; Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2003, 2011) as well as numerous articles on how to make sense of the field, for example by alluding to the different disciplines that researchers of OL derive from (Easterby-Smith, 1997), through systematic reviews (Babuji and Crossan, 2004; Castaneda et al., 2018; Popova-Nowak and Cseh, 2015; Rashman et al., 2009) and attempts to predict the future (Argote, 2011; Easterby-Smith et al., 1999, 2000). This article belongs to the latter category, taking stock of the field aiming to point toward a way forward.
Turning toward the theories of learning, it is possible to detect a dividing line within the field of OL between seeing learning as a “thing” that can be made to “do” something to somebody (e.g. help motivate persons) or something (e.g. help make organizational strategies come through) (e.g. Babuji and Crossan, 2004; Popova-Nowak and Cseh, 2015), and OL as part of everyday work and organizing in which learning is an unfolding aspect that cannot be predicted and controlled, but maybe supported (e.g. Easterby-Smith et al., 2000; Gherardi, 2009; Vince et al., 2018). Understood in the first sense, “learning” is instrumental in a narrow and causal (“if-then”) way, for example, in making persons change their behavior for organizations to reach their goals. Underlying this understanding, persons are independent beings, separated from the world by their skin, but changeable through providing the right incentives (e.g. Caldwell, 2012; Senge et al., 1999). The learning theories that support this understanding are behaviorist (e.g. Qvortrup and Wiberg, 2017; Tomic, 1993) and the understanding of organizations are as entities that can be developed and changed by “applying” OL (e.g. Argyris and Schön, 1996; Elkjaer and Nickelsen, 2016). The epistemological world is realist, which entails a rationalist-functionalist understanding of organizations in which it is possible to decide things to happen, make a plan of implementation, and then this will be fulfilled (e.g. Adler et al., 2014; Scott and Davis, 2015). It is an understanding of organizations in which a part may be malfunctioning or possible to enhance and as such be adjusted. In this strand of OL literature, the problem may be addressed as an adjustment of human beings and their unexplored potential for development. This is illustrated when OL is dealt with as for example an exploration of how defensive human reasoning leads to organizational errors, which may be corrected through developmental activities to make humans realize the detrimental effects of their behavior (Argyris, 2000).
In another way of looking at theories of learning within the field of OL, humans’ minds and motivation are not the sole center of attention but bodies, contexts, and materialities are also included, and another “unit of analyses” is employed, for example, “situation” (Dewey, 1939 [1988]; Brandi and Elkjaer, 2013) or “practice” (Gherardi, 2015; Nicolini, 2012). Here, organizations are understood as multiple situations or practices often operating in different directions. Humans are part of situations or practices but other issues of work and organizing is equally important for learning (from emotions to wider historical and economic issues). This understanding of OL rests upon a social constructionist ontology, which means to see learning as a continuous and emergent process of meaning-making and in the words of Easterby-Smith et al. (2000) a challenge to the traditional idea that learning takes place within the heads of individuals or in organizational systems and structures. It [the social constructionist perspective, AU] starts from the assumption that learning occurs, and knowledge is created, mainly through conversations and interactions
In this understanding, learning is collective and woven together in interactive processes of “identities, artefacts, ideologies, rules, language, morality and interests” (Easterby-Smith et al., 2000: 788). This means that it is not possible to see organizations as entities and spoken with one voice, but as continuous processes of meaning-making (i.e. learning) stimulated by the tensions of many voices and practices (Brandi and Elkjaer, 2013; Fenwick, 2010; Weick and Westley, 1996). OL is not a functionalist means; a theoretical construct to be applied to adjust human behavior in accordance with some overall organizational goal detached from the actual work practices and human actors but is unavoidable and uncontrollable.
These two ontologies of OL guided my overall reading of the field, when I sat out to find out in what ways OL is still a relevant theoretical construct. I, however, also wanted some guidelines to differentiate an engagement in critique and thought provocation to scrutinize and (try to) understand why ML is no longer a relevant outlet for OL scholars. The question is whether the answer can be boiled down to be “for” or “against” management (Clegg et al., 2006; Parker, 2002) or to be included or excluded from “critical management studies” (Clegg et al., 2011; Grey, 2005 [2017]). Does being “critical” mean to engage in critical action learning (Vince et al., 2018), critical management pedagogy (Reynolds, 2009), or critical management learning (Fox, 2009). Does it mean to work from a practice theoretical and performative (Gherardi, 2009; Nicolini, 2012; Schatzki, 2017) as opposed to a functionalist and ostensive perspective (Czarniawska, 2008). In this article, I work from the former, but extends this to work from a pragmatist philosophical perspective in order to include learning as the development of an ability for critical thinking, which is equivalent to the concept of “inquiry” (Dewey, 1933 [1986], 1938 [1986]). Critical thinking is to be attentive to the tensions between different voices and practices, and to be acted upon through questioning and discussing these differences as well as the “taken-for-granted” (see also Kelemen et al., 2019; Putnam, 2009). Critical thinking includes to understand organizations as unfolding social arrangements rather than predefined entities and destinies (Abbott, 2009). I am inspired by the American pragmatist, John Dewey (1938 [1988]), when he says, We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything. (pp. 29–30)
This means to understand learning as part of practicing and of organizing in which it is possible to question, to ask, and to (also) listen to the experts who (may) include the people doing the work. This is different from thinking that OL begins with management, as was the method of the early functionalists (see, for example, Scott and Davis, 2015), because who says that “top management […] [has] a monopoly over the interpretation of the best interest of the [workplace]” (Hasle and Sørensen, 2013: 24).
The methods and the data
In my first inquiry and research question, “is OL still a relevant theoretical construct,” I made a continuation of the Hari Babuji and Mary Crossan’s (2004) review of the field of OL ranging from 1990 to 2002, because they had the “phenomenon of learning” (p. 398) at the center of their research, which resonates with my ideas on OL and the purpose of this article. I began when they stopped and scrutinized the period from 2003 to 2018. Babuji and Crossan used the search engine Web of Science (WOS), and I copied their methods and used “organizational learning” as a “topic.” I narrowed their search in two ways. First, to literature within management and organization studies (the WOS “categories,” “management,” and “business”), and second, by choosing the WOS “document type” as “articles” to focus upon journal publications to depict the publication pattern of OL in journals.
When having demonstrated that publications were not in decline, I made my second inquiry asking, “in what ways are OL a relevant theoretical construct?” Here, I first took a closer look at the content of the 50 published articles from 2015 to 2018 in TLO by reading the structured abstracts and (when relevant, which was often) the full papers. Second, I made a short open and qualitative questionnaire addressed to the research community behind the OLKC conferences. This comprised the self-elected group of Board members who were on the mailing list at the time of my research (end of August 2919), and whom I asked to point to relevant researchers within the field of OL. The questions in the questionnaire were the same for all and addressed the (1) theme(s) they saw themselves as having contributed with to the field of OL and their anticipated future (2) contribution(s). I also asked them a question about what they saw as the most pertinent questions in the (3) future of OL. The last question was (4) when they had begun to see themselves as a participant within the field of OL (year and/or maybe an event that initiated their interest).
Out of the 27, 13 board members filled out the email questionnaire after three requests, and the snowballing method resulted in a list of 110 persons of which a majority happened to be past and current members of the ML editorial board. They were all emailed the questionnaire and after three requests, 25 persons returned my email. Six wrote back and told me that they were no longer relevant as OL scholars, and two did not answer my questionnaire, but sent me some of their papers (which I have not included in my data). This left me with 17 filled answers to the questions in my questionnaire, which means that all in all 30 persons answered my brief questionnaire.
When coding the qualitative data from reading the structured abstracts, I first had the initial dividing line between the different ontologies (functionalism and social constructionism) and theories of learning (behaviorism and an aspect of human interaction and organizing) in mind. This, however, turned out to be not very helpful to say much about the content in these abstracts, because a fair amount of these in one way or another spoke into OL as a means for organizational goals and adjusting human behavior to fit these goals. Concretely, when interpreting the structured abstracts from TLO, I have coded these using a table in terms of content, that is, what theme(s) were addressed in the paper and whether they were mainly empirical, theoretical, or both. I also coded them according to the aim(s) of the paper, for example, “The present study attempts to study the impact of market orientation (MO) and organizational learning (OL) on innovative capabilities of the organization” (Raj and Srivastava, 2016: 372), which I read as an example of OL understood in a causal way where OL is a mean (along with MO) to develop innovative capabilities. The abstracts have been read and reread many times, and when needed (as in the above example), I read the full papers to check my first impressions of the papers.
I have interpreted the answers from my email questionnaire through the same above overall theoretical framework bearing in mind the richness and variation as well as the briefness of the answers. The email data, however, differs from the data from the TLO papers, because the respondents have been asked about their current and future understanding of the field whereas the TLO papers represent research conducted and reported in articles, which I then interpret within a certain overall framework. I made several readings of the questionnaire answers, which in the first place was written into a table following the inquiry, that is, name, country, year for involvement in the field, and in what connection (e.g. OL studies and/or participation in an OL conference or other event involving OL). The other two columns were “contributions (past and present)” and “assessment of the future of the field.” This table was made into a new table in which I condensed the texts to create an easier overview (Giorgi, 2002). I, nevertheless, kept going back and forth between the original texts and the different tables in order to create some sort of a coherent pattern while maintaining the variety in the answers.
The validity of the research is not one of representation, but one in which I scrutinize the past through a particular lens and (try to) propose a possible future for the field of OL by an elaboration on the different understandings of OL as a theoretical construct. Regarding the quantitative part, there are other, and newer, reviews of the field of OL (e.g. Castaneda et al., 2018; Popova-Nowak and Cseh, 2015), but the Babuji and Crossan (2004) is still the most explicit on the learning aspect of OL and covered the purpose of publications in terms of numbers, which was the purpose with this part of the research (see, for example, Wang, 2019). Regarding the qualitative part of my research, the validity criterion is connected to the research question and purpose, that is, do I get plausible answers to what I ask for (Kvale, 1996)? In this case, do I present readers with plausible answers to the question of “in what ways are OL a relevant theoretical construct,” and is it possible to say anything about the future of the field from these data. I believe so when pointing to the problems of OL as a narrow versus a wider field of research, and also the proposal of consequences in terms of pointing to a pragmatist theory of learning. Regarding the reliability of the research, I have to say that I did not do this inquiry as a neutral scholar. OL is a field that I have been working in for about 30 years, and I took part in the first Organizational Learning (OL) conference in 1996, which was held in Lancaster and organized by Mark Easterby-Smith and Luis Araujo (1999) (see also Elkjaer 1999). This affiliation, naturally, has an impact on my inquiry, my writing, and interpretation although it is probably impossible to say precisely which. I have, however, committed myself at the best of my abilities to be as explicit as possible in laying out my methods and own thoughts. I now turn to answer the initial research question: “is OL still a relevant theoretical construct?”
A growing but changing publication pattern
Babuji and Crossan (2004) found that the number of articles published on OL had exploded from 1990 to 2002, noted that “In 1990, only four articles on OL were published; in 2002, 98 articles appeared” (p. 398). Overall, they identified 707 publications in their WOS search in which the search term “organizational learning” appeared. Babuji and Crossan (2004) concluded that empirical research within the OL field had indeed grown since the late 1990s and that “the field has moved from generating interesting questions to providing answers to organizational problems such as innovation, strategic choices and performance” (p. 410). They found that a learning perspective was applied to explain organizational issues like, for example, performance, innovation, and technology adoption. In other words, Babuji and Crossan’s (2004) stocktaking was addressing OL in which learning was instrumental in dealing with organizational problems related to technology, globalization, and competition.
Given my limitations to the “categories” “management” and “business” and “document type” to “articles,” I found 55 records in 2002 (i.e. down from the 98 in the Babuji and Crossan (2004) all-inclusive search) and 162 in 2018. 2 Overall, 1543 records were published during the 16-year period from 2003 through to 2018. 3 This number certainly and initially much to my surprise points to a continuous growth in publications within the field of OL (see Figure 1).
Number of articles published on organizational learning from 2003 to 2018 (total 1543 records), Web of Science.
The evidence is clear; the interest in publishing work on OL has not diminished when we stick to numbers. The publication pattern in terms of which journals publish work on OL, however, appears to be changing. When looking at the 10 journals that had the most articles from 2003 to 2018, the picture looks like the below (see Figures 2 and 3).
The 10 journals that had the most articles published on organizational learning from 2003 to 2018 (total 1543 records), Web of Science.
In this picture, Management Learning, Organization Science, and Journal of Business research are the frontrunners with, respectively, 74, 60, and 55 records. When considering that TLO was not registered in WOS before 2015, the record of 50 is also very high. Narrowing the period to the 4 years from 2015 to 2018 changed the picture dramatically. 4
The 10 journals that had the most articles published on organizational learning in 2015–2018 (634 records), Web of Science.
TLO has by now taken the lead although less than half of the total number of articles in this journal is picked up by the topic of “organizational learning” (50 out of 107 records). It is, however, noticeable that the front-runner in 2003–2018, ML, is not even among the top-10 when the period is narrowed down to the 4 years from 2015 to 2018. From an average of 4.6 records on OL per year in ML, it is in total seven (average 1.8 records per year) from 2015 to 2018. The quantitative data implies strong specialization of the publication pattern within the field of OL in a way in which it is possible to talk about a leading journal, TLO. How this is mirrored in terms of the research question, “in what ways are OL a relevant theoretical construct” is the focus of the next section.
OL—as published in the current main outlet
When looking at the (structured) abstracts (and papers) in TLO, I was first struck by the amount of different countries that were represented by the first author of articles published in TLO. Although the United States and Western Europe accounted for more than half of the papers, Asia, the former Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South America were well represented with a little less than 20 articles, that is, close to half of the articles published in TLO during the period under scrutiny, which signals a wider geographical reach than the answers from my email questionnaire (see later).
When I began reading the abstracts in TLO, I had in mind the crude dividing line between learning understood as behavioral adjustment to organizational goals versus an aspect of human interaction and organizational practices. This, however, turned out to be a much too coarse differentiation, because only 3 of the 50 papers were written from the latter perspective. One is a paper by Chia (2017) in which he “explores the potential contribution to a process-based ‘practice-turn’ in social theory for understanding organizational learning.” Chia (2017) introduces the concept of “wayfinding” as organizational learning, which “entails learning and knowing through iterative practical coping” (p. 115) with the organizational issues at hand. The second paper is a paper by Gherardi et al. (2018) in which the purpose is to “describe how organizational members became storywriters of an important process of organizational change.” They are inspired by Chia (2017) when they refer to story writing as a “social practice of wayfinding, that is of knowing as one goes.” A third paper within the approach to OL as an aspect of organizational practices is written by Jørgensen (2018) and in which he introduces a “space of storytelling as a new principle for learning.” Jørgensen (2018) proposes that a space of storytelling emphasizes a space “to pursue new ideas, experiment and do what people are passionate about” (p. 419). In these papers, the authors understand the construct of OL (and organizational knowing) as a helpful and meaningful theoretical construct to both understand the everyday practical coping and dealing with organizational changes as well as the pursuit of developing new ideas through experimentation. Learning is in these cases not driven by “rational-calculative logics” (Chia, 2017) but derives from finding ways as one moves along helped by storytelling and writing, and it is as such part of everyday practice of organizing work.
Framing the remaining 47 papers as just instrumental in a narrow sense is, as mentioned, too blunt, and in the issues brought forward by scholars you sense the energy and care for the field of OL. The papers are indeed varied and difficult to classify in a simple manner. I, nevertheless, propose that it is possible though my interpretations to find a key to why these papers on OL do not end up in ML. Although they may provoke thought, most of them do not engage in critique (how vague a term this may be). The question is whether they are relevant to practitioners. This depends on whether relevance is defined as a here-and-now relevance, and through a narrow demand of individual enterprises’ performance or including a wider and future-oriented relevance.
About 20 papers may be put into categories, which are dealing with OL as a means for the enhancement of performance or providing empirical evidence of a pre-defined model of OL either through testing or some form of measurement. Seven papers are about “unlearning,” the single most used term in the 50 papers. About six of the papers are more on individual than organizational learning, for example, when scholars in a paper on the enhancement of client-facing consultants write: “Understanding how learning and knowledge building occurs at the individual level may provide helpful insight into how organizational learning happens at the individual level” (McQueen and Janson, 2016: 203) and conclude that it is better to focus upon individuals in training and learning activities. The remaining less than half of the papers are of different kinds of which some display a touch of behaviorist learning theories (e.g. Simonin, 2017), and others are more critical (e.g. Flood and Romm, 2018; McKenzie and Varney, 2018). I present my interpretations under the following headlines, “OL as a means for the enhancement of performance”; “Evidence of OL as a model of dimensions”; and “OL in need of unlearning and facilitation.”
OL as a means for the enhancement of performance
This interpretation of OL is inspired by the Babuji and Crossan’s (2004) review (see above) when they in their conclusion write that a vast majority of empirical research on OL was “conducted by strategy researchers who employed learning theories to examine performance and related organizational phenomenon” (p. 403). OL is here applied (“employed”) to enhance (“examine”) performance and related organizational phenomenon. This understanding of OL is also found in some of the TLO articles. This is, for example, the case in an article by Zhou et al. (2015) when they ask, “Does organizational learning lead to higher firm performance?” and answer it by first developing a measurement tool consisting of eight learning dimensions grouped under three headings (learning orientation, learning process, learning leadership) and measure these against perceptual innovation measures and objective performance measures through a questionnaire. Zhou et al.’s (2015) conclusion is that “The positive correlations between the eight learning dimensions and the measures of firms’ performance lend credence to the efficacy of the organizational learning concepts” (p. 271). Aligning the measurement of finances with (human) perception is in this paper proposed as a new methodology to assess the quality of OL. The underlying theory of learning is that it can be broken into separate parts and measured against in this case perceptions of innovation and financial performance where learning is assumed to be a means in adjusting behavior within the eight dimensions of OL. The conclusion is that intervention should address “a variety and different combinations of organizational learning characteristics rather than interventions that solely focus on singular or a limited number of dimensions” (Zhou et al., 2015: 283). This may or may not be thought-provoking and speak to practitioners, but there was no engagement in critique by for example discussing whether the underlying causalities and concepts of learning are doable in the proposed interventions in current organizational practices.
Another example of OL related to performance enhancement is an article by Pedler and Burgoyne (2017) in which they ask the question, “Is the learning organization still alive?” One of the main issues discussed is “performance versus learning orientation” citing one of their respondents for saying that the “emphasis on high performance in organizations has tended to diminish the learning aspects” (Pedler and Burgoyne, 2017: 122). They conclude that part of the problem is that “there is not much evidence, beyond a few cases, that the LO enhances performance. This could be a useful direction for researchers, to add to the very few studies on the LO and its relationship to performance management” (Pedler and Burgoyne, 2017: 123). There are other interesting issues related to OL and the LO (e.g. if the LO was nothing but a contemporary and now outlived fad) debated in the Pedler and Burgoyne (2017) article, which is based upon their own consultancy experiences and a small survey. There is, however, no debate on the concept of learning, which appears to be rather common trait in literature on OL. Questioning the relations between OL and performance, and whether the goal with OL was to enhance performance, that is, a more efficient behavior in organizations is not present in the article. In other articles, the causality was reversed from OL being the “active thing” to OL being the model to be evidenced.
Evidence of OL as a model of dimensions
The inspiration for researching OL as a model of dimensions may be traced to Marsick and Watkins’ (e.g. Marsick, 2013) many years of work on their DLOQ model (“Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire”), which is based upon their theory of informal and incidental learning (Marsick and Watkins, 1997; another inspirational measurement tool is found in Chiva et al., 2007). The idea is that there is a trigger (surprise, challenge) that stimulates a response, which make individuals act based upon their cognitive and emotional understanding of the trigger. In Marsick and Watkins’ (2003) understanding, this leads to individuals’ strategies for action, which is determined by the organization’ rules, memory, values, the system of relationships or structure, and the underlying dynamic or pattern that characterizes the organization. They define an LO as one “that has embedded the capacity to adapt or to respond quickly and in novel ways while working to remove barriers to learning” (Marsick and Watkins, 2003: 136). The idea is that organizations may increase their capacity to learn by making changes in the four systems that influence learning: strategy, structure, slack, and ideology, and the DLOQ is a diagnostic tool to measure changes in OL practices and culture (“context”). Enhancement of performance both in terms of financial and knowledge are related to evolution toward what Marsick and Watkins define to be an LO.
The Jain and Moreno (2015) article is an example inspired by the DLOQ tool in an empirical study of a heavy engineering firm in India in which they wanted to investigate the impact of OL on the firm’s performance and KM practices. The idea is that an OL culture can “facilitate in creating, sharing and exploiting knowledge” (Jain and Moreno, 2015: 18) and that people in an OL culture “need to be encouraged to foster knowledge creation, sharing and exploitation” (Jain and Moreno, 2015: 18). If firms can effectively manage this process, the road to competitive advantages is paved. Based on two hypotheses, a self-reported questionnaire, a 6-point Likert-type scale, and an adaptation of the DLOQ instrument, they concluded that “rewarding employees for higher achievements at the individual level and creating the culture of team work at an organizational level facilitate in promoting KM practices in an organization” (Jain and Moreno, 2015: 27). OL is both to be supported on the individual level (sometimes termed “empowerment”) and as a context conducive for OL. The issue here is that OL is predefined and aimed for specific goals measured by the DLOQ instrument.
Another paper by Voolaid and Ehrlich (2017) on OL of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Estonia also draws upon the DLOQ measurement tool. The idea is that HEI to an increasing degree are under pressure due to demographics, globalization, decrease in state funding, increase of online technology, heterogeneous student population, and so on, and that they “can respond to external challenges and pressures when they meet the criteria of the learning organization” (Voolaid and Ehrlich, 2017: 341). In the study, the DLOQ was both used for interviews and a questionnaire using the Likert-type scale. Two universities in Estonia were involved and selected as their market participation rate, level of internationalization, and ownership form were different. The market participation rate is denoted by the share of students who pay themselves for the studies, which in the private business school (PBS), business school of a public university (BPU), and engineering faculties of the same public university (EPU) was 100, 90, and 30 percent, respectively. The results were that all HEIs under study think the universities have problems with the creation of “systems to capture and transform learning,” which may be due to that university is a structurally rigid and inflexible organization, “which is the biggest obstacle to its development into a learning organization” (Voolaid and Ehrlich, 2017: 251). Furthermore, all respondents “estimate that the strongest organizational learning aspect of HEIs is leadership” (Voolaid and Ehrlich, 2017: 251). The paper is measured against a fixed goal defined by the DLOQ instrument, which means that the discussion remains within this logic. It is an interesting paper, but maybe it is not so thought-provoking to conclude that the obstacles to a development of a LO is to be found in rigid structures and leadership. The engagement in a discussion of this conclusion is blowing in the wind as is the use of a measurement tool for assessing OL. The idea of OL (and the LO) as a fixed goal is also present in the debate on unlearning and facilitation, which is the theme to which I now turn.
OL in need of unlearning and facilitation
In Easterby-Smith et al.’s (2000) article reflecting upon the 1999 OLK conference under the heading, “organizational learning: debates past, present and future,” they write that the following issues were included in the conference: strategic and international learning, KM, communities of practice, politics, ethics, and the measurement of OL. They further write, Some issues were notable for their absence. These included some long-standing debates around levels of learning, whether learning necessarily implies cognitive or behavioral change, the respective values of single- and double-loop learning, the relationship between learning and
On this background, it is striking that during these 4 years of scrutiny of TLO, the issue of “unlearning” appears important both in terms of discussing the term, developing, and testing a model of unlearning. Regarding the latter, the Fiol and O’Connor’s (2017a, 2017b) two-part article is an example. The purpose in part 1 is “to develop a process model of unlearning established organizational routines” (Fiol and O’Connor, 2017a: 13), and the approach in part 2 is “to demonstrate that initial destabilization of old patterns and the subsequent behavioral processes of discarding the old and experimenting with the new are qualitatively different” (Fiol and O’Connor, 2017b: 82).
When discussing the term unlearning, Starbuck (2017) “aims to summarize four decades of research into organizational adaptation, learning and unlearning” (p. 30) through reviewing published research on these matters, and Nguyen (2017) does the same through an interview with Starbuck. In this interview, unlearning is stated as “an important requirement for organizational learning and adaptation. Change cannot occur in organizations until old knowledge and practices are replaced by new ideas and methods” (p. 58). Although the ideas of unlearning old routines and knowledge may appear at first glance appealing and promising, unlearning rests upon a theory of learning and knowledge in which it is possible to predict the outcome in terms of “right” and “wrong” knowledge and, in turn, behavior. It is a theory of learning in which OL is understood as instrumental in getting rid of the obsolete for organizational adaptation to be adjusted. The idea of unlearning rests upon a theory of learning in which it is possible to control and align behavioral change into some a priori set goals, which may be “facilitated.”
The idea of facilitation is for example the case in Baškarada et al.’s (2016) article when they talk about how a specific model of OL may be used to facilitate OL: “The paper presents a cyclical eight-stage knowledge generation process and demonstrates how agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) may be used to facilitate OL” (p. 429). OL is here a means that can be facilitated through knowledge generation and simulation. In this case, OL is coupled to knowledge whereas in another case, OL is facilitated through action learning. This is for example the case when the purpose is to “present the results of the pilot run of a research project which aims at evaluating the applicability of project-based action learning (PAL) to shop floor organizational learning (OL) component in a manufacturing company in Dongguan, China” (Cheung et al., 2016: 274). This study is aimed at shop floor workers, and the PAL framework is inspired by Revans (1978 [1998]) action learning formula: L(earning) = P(rogramming) + Q(uestioning). The PAL framework “was developed to help organizations to operationalize OL initiatives through the use of action learning and team learning in real projects at work” and requires “pre-set learning goals with the organization committed to providing the necessary OL infrastructure, guidance and facilitation” (Cheung et al., 2016: 276). It is when OL (and the LO) is being pre-defined in rather narrow ways, with right and wrong models as well as a rather strict roadmap to guide the way that I see (unfulfilled) potentials toward the provocation of thought and engagement in critique.
Summing up OL as instrumental in a narrow sense
There are other issues in TLO over the 4 years that I have researched into, and the variety of issues reverberating around OL is fascinating, and it is possible to sense the energy and commitment to the field of OL with which these abstracts are written. A fair amount of the abstracts, however, are written in line with a strong belief in the possibilities for increasing performance through “using” OL to regulate human behavior in organizations whether this is done through OL as a means or OL as a pre-defined model aimed for or to be unlearned. This means that OL is understood as a relevant theoretical construct through an understanding of learning as behaviorist that rests upon a causality between incentives and results (stimulus and response) within current organizational boundaries. This understanding of OL is valid, the TLO articles are relevant, written, and presumably read with interest. It, however, means to understand OL in abstracted manners as specific a priori appointed processes and results, which are easily accounted for and measured but are rather detached from the lived organizational practices in which much more is interfering with learning and organizing (e.g. Schatzki, 2006). It is in researchers’ questioning of the purpose and motivation for research within OL that I see a future for the field—and a responsibility for the development of OL, which in the long run may be helpful to practitioners. The question is whether the future of OL holds these wider perspectives, which the answers in my email questionnaire seem to imply.
OL according to the OLKC Board and their suggested colleagues
In the following, I interpret the data from the email questionnaire to the OLKC Board members and their proposed colleagues in order to see in what ways OL is a relevant theoretical construct and how this points to the future of the field of OL. First some numbers, there was an almost equal gender balance in the answers (16 males and 14 females), but in terms of geography only one answer was situated outside Western Europe, the United States, and Canada making the email questionnaire represent a more narrow geographical reach than researchers publishing in TLO. About a third (9) of the scholars see themselves as having been within the field from before 1999, while double as many (18) have come to the field within the last 20 years through their studies, supervisors, and/or participation in the conferences of the field (three is “unknown”). Almost a third (nine) of the scholars who have answered my inquiry wrote that they felt marginal to the field or questioned whether they (still) belong(ed) to the field or not, but have in spite hereof answered the questionnaire and has, as such, been included in my interpretations.
Judging from the relatively few answers that I received, 30 relevant answers out of the 147 emails sent out to people who took the time to answer, the interest in OL appears to have diminished. When reading the questionnaire answers, however, an overall feeling is that they are more critical and ask for OL to be attending to wider issues than narrow instrumentality for the benefit of individual organizations in order to have a future relevance as a field of research. In the following, the interpretations are made under the following headings, “OL in need of change,” “OL as obsolete and irrelevant,” “OL as having lost its critical touch,” and a summing up that includes “OL as bridging and embracing.”
OL in need of change
A running thread in all the answers is that for the OL field to have a future, the theoretical construct of OL needs to be adapted to a new (organizational) world, and to be related to the societal developments in terms of technology and globalization in which climate changes and sustainable production is mentioned as important—as well as how we as researchers can help in this endeavor. In short, this can be expressed in two overall questions when asked about the future of OL: (1) “How do organizations respond to the grand challenges awaiting us,” and (2) “How can researchers involve themselves –working with organizations to help them adapt to the future and, thus, create answers to problems yet unanswered” (S-11). 5 S-11 connects to the call from Anderson et al. (2020) and a theory of learning that relies on the basic pragmatist philosophical understanding of the world as an open “pluralistic universe” always in the making (e.g. James, 1898). It is also a call for researchers’ responsibility and a plea to not hide behind a desk, numbers, and abstract causalities.
In the following, the grand challenges are specified to address two “burning questions” related to “megatrends” like “machine learning/AI and less stable employment relationships with more workers as self-employed, maybe part of the precariat, without formal, stable membership of an organization” (S-8). Work and working conditions are transcending individual organizations to encompass the labor market as a whole and its future development. Indirectly, competition, and maybe the race toward the ubiquitous performance demands that squeeze workers out into less stable work conditions, is addressed. This is accentuated as a concern by S-23 who also include new ways of working when she or he talks about the technological development and what it may imply for the future development of OL: “The social and epistemic implications of digitalization is one theme incorporating several questions. Such as how professional judgement is exercised, how knowledge is generated and critically assessed, and how access to learning opportunities at work is distributed in organizational practices.” I read S-23 comments as addressing the consequences of digitalization (e.g. decisions about social benefits based upon algorithms), which puts an enormous pressure on professionals’ abilities to stay sane and able to maintain their judgmental skills toward clients as well as the opportunities for learning among themselves and the organizational practices of which they are a part. In pragmatist inspired learning theoretical terms, this would imply possibilities to be able to react toward injustices and organize possibilities for asking questions and proposing solutions that are not guided by a concept of OL as resting upon specific dimensions, but are situated and concrete.
Several scholars address the issue of technology in one way or another. One scholar says that the most pertinent question in the future of OL is “The challenges of learning in a virtually connected world” (S-1). In much the same ways, another says, “How use of algorithms and digital technology will impact and shape OL going forward” (S-5). This is also addressed by S-6 but she or he adds “sustainability,” which is a theme addressed also as the following question: “How is OL to be described, analyzed and discussed in the context of present societal challenge of sustainability” (S-28). In similar ways, the future is described as “How new ways of working (including technology) have implications for our understanding of work, […] which may have implications for learning” (S-3). These scholars address the issue of OL as in need of being inclusive to new ways of working and technological changes, they transcend individual organizations and ask whether it is possible to change the theoretical construct of OL and the field of OL to encompass societal and organizational changes, an open world, researchers’ responsibility in including helping efforts to maintain professional abilities for exercising judgments at work. Inspiration might be found in TLO and the ideas about “wayfinding” (Chia, 2017), story writing (Gherardi et al., 2018), and storytelling (Jørgensen, 2018).
OL as obsolete and irrelevant
When OL is deemed obsolete and irrelevant as a theoretical construct, “learning” (with whatever content the respondents have given it) apparently is here to stay. Here are some of the quotes from which I derived this conclusion: “[…] although OL seems to be less of a primary construct in management and organization studies, learning is and always will be an indispensable resource for and within organizations and organizational scholars” (S-12). “Learning” seems to be a somehow eternal term, in this quote as a “resource,” but in combination with “organizational,” OL appears to have lost its appeal in management and organization studies. One of the other scholars echoes this: “The issue (learning related to work and organizations, AU) is one of those that will never go away. The question is under which ‘fashionable’ heading it will be discussed” (S-4). “Learning” is a term that is taken for granted, but maybe this is so because it is not in any way defined, which seems to be the case for much research within the field of OL (and workplace learning) (see, for example, Fenwick, 2008). In the case of S-4, I read the issue to refer to the movements in the theories of learning within the field that is alluded to by Easterby-Smith et al.’s (2000) article in which they claimed some themes to be obsolete and others to be on the march forward, for example, that learning is not happening in heads or behaviors of people but between them in and through organizational practices.
A scholar who has not been active within the field for a number of years underscores the theoretical construct of OL as obsolete with reference to what appears to be of interest to current PhD students of which none seems to think that OL is an interesting theoretical construct: Out of the 40 PhD students in X department [in Y business school], I do not think I can point to a single student who has an unequivocal OL focus in their project. I believe that this to a certain extent is due to that the empirical phenomena, e.g. organizational change processes, adoption and implementation of new technologies are now being analyzed with other theoretical perspectives. (S-24)
In this scholar’s understanding, learning appears connected to change, adoption, and implementation of new technologies, and she or he further claims that “The ambidexterity discussion (exploitation and exploration at the same time) has made the learning problematic very simple and uninteresting” (S-24). I read this scholar as a confirmation that when a complex issue like learning is boiled down to generalities, to causalities between items and dimensions it loses its appeal to (in this case) young scholars in search of a relevant theoretical construct to understand organizational phenomena.
This sense of the field as obsolete and having lost appeal is in slightly other words echoed in the assessment below when OL as a term appears to have become more “diffused,” when she or he says that we “used to talk about ‘OL’ but now discuss it in more specific related terms […], [which] all seem to carry themes that we might have considered OL 20 years ago” (S-15). This scholar refers to issues like the above-mentioned importance of “judgement” as a more precise and specific term than OL. Where S-15 talks about OL as more specific, S-8 talks about OL as being part of wider fields within management and organizational studies. In other words, S-8 questions whether OL can maintain “its identity as a field or it becomes more dispersed as partially subsumed under various broader field like innovation, strategy, etc.” (S-8). Again, it is as if the content of OL is still alive and thriving but is now either separated into smaller parts or seized by other organizational issues and terms.
Anderson et al.’s (2020) conclusion about relevance to practitioner is also reflected in answers from the OLKC Board and colleagues. A scholar who has worked as a consultant for many years, but now has gotten an academic degree and is employed in academia says, “The field is so distanced from practice that many lose their foothold [when studying the field of OL, AU]” (S-22). The idea of the OL field as being (un-)helpful to practice is addressed by other scholars, for example, expressed like the following question: “How to create stronger connections between the theory and research in OL to other more recent theory and research on organizational change models and to practice overall?” (S-2). Expressed very briefly by a scholar, the future of OL is “As ever: how do OL theories help us learn to organize better” (S-21). For the theoretical construct of OL to be relevant, it needs to be helpful to practitioners. It is not clear in what way this is to be, and there are apparently many understandings of this, which I will return to in the discussion.
OL as having lost its critical touch
The future relevance is also related to stances that are more critical toward the dominant managerialist voice that has glued to OL, and which also may be read into my analysis of (some of) the TLO articles. A scholar for example says, “I am not sure I do identify with the field of OL to the extent that it has become equated with facilitating organizational change for increased profit and efficiency” (S-18). This critique is related to the issue of what is “relevant knowledge” within the field of OL, which is answered by S-9 as knowledge answering to the question of “social relevance and social impact of research in organizations” (S-9). In addition, there is a call for responsibility and care, which includes our own practices as researchers, and I quote, […] the “organizational” is not only of the field organizing, but at the same time of the researchers’ own epistemic practices. The issue of responsibility or respons-ability becomes central. It is amazing how the issue of “caring” or responsible and sustainable learning is almost absent from the field […]. (S-13)
A hint to re-make OL as a relevant theoretical construct is to see OL as more inclusive to societal problems and to researchers as adhering to these wider issues, a wider understanding of relevance to practice including an open-ended understanding of learning. This is elaborated in the following summing up on the future of OL.
OL as bridging and embracing
Summing up the interpretations from the inquiry, scholars are pointing to the field as no longer “trendy” and as having gone “out of fashion,” which is referred to as having to do with the theoretical construct of OL no longer being able to include real-life organizational challenges and problems. Some of the solutions pointed to is to reach out to and connect with other fields within organization and management studies. The litmus test of the survival of a field termed “OL” appears to be whether the theoretical development hereof will be able to include the technological development and the new working conditions that come with globalization and competition. In the answers from the OLKC board and their suggested colleagues, globalization is not only addressed as an organizational problem but a global one inherent in the call for sustainability and researchers’ responsibility. In this sense, OL transcends being an organizational mean in the narrow sense and to include the global need for new ways of production, management who cares about and is responsible to not only workers but also climate and digitalization. This may be to bridge and embrace other fields and issues.
For example, “I think the OL field needs to bridge the gap with its detailed connection with other organizational processes: entrepreneurship, innovation, internationalization, production, supply chain management, mergers, and acquisitions, etc.” (S-7). This is also expressed like this, “OL is not an isolated area, and I think its relationship with the neighboring research areas is interesting” (S-30). “In my opinion the need, and most pertinent movement in the future of OL, is connecting with other disciplines to address OL and organizational problems” (S-9). This connection to other fields appears to be important, and a scholar expresses it in the following way: “If the field is not ‘dying’ then it needs to refresh its vision and to pay more attention to those scholars working in neighboring fields” (S-13). In the above is mentioned bridging OL to several other fields that all appears to speak into issues of being “answers to organizational problems.” Other scholars talk about bridging to somewhat broader fields not immediately related to organizational problems defined as individual enterprises’ problems. These are, for example, connecting to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and feminist new materialism. For S-29, it is connections to “practices and connections between practices to understand the possibilities and constraints to changes and as such also to processes of learning and OL.” The proposal of connecting to and between practices I see as transcending the problems of individual enterprises and opening up to wider issues of the organizing of work and individual enterprises as well as to a theory of learning that is able to include more open-ended answers. This is elaborated in the below discussion in which I connect to a more general discussion of what it means for organizational and management studies to be relevant to practice and practitioners.
Discussion
In the beginning, I referred to Anderson et al. (2020) for the field of management and organization studies to be of too little relevance to practitioners while they also appealed to researchers to provoke critical reflection and be helpful in developing new practices for the future. They called for an orientation toward “relationism, ethics and reflexivity” as well as maintain a criticism toward the “taken-for-granted’ in the study and practice of management and organizations” (Anderson et al., 2020: 31). The results of both my reading of TLO contributions and my email questionnaire about the future of OL as a field of research point to similar conclusions. I think, however, that it also points to rethink what it means to be relevant to practice and practitioners. On one hand, the TLO papers and the questionnaire point to a need to be relevant to organizations, managers, and practitioners, and on the other hand, this relevance needs to reflect the wider world of which organizations are a part. For the field of OL, this would mean both to encompass the problems of the realm of organizational practices as they are understood by its practitioners, which may be immediate “answers to organizational problems” as well as to see these as connected to the world at large. The latter is to see the immediate problems and answers as connected to a world in which natural resources are scarce and climate changes are a threat to some industries (obvious one is the oil industry) and a possibility to other industries (e.g. the windmill industries). Realizing this connectivity between the “smaller worlds” and the “larger worlds” means that organizational problems are connected to issues like sustainability, technological development in which algorithms (and big data) play a larger and larger role in, for example, decision-making as well as new working conditions with more self-employed and temporarily employed workers in new forms of enterprises in a platform economy (see, for example, Davis, 2017). All these issues (and many more like global diseases that shut the world down) calls for both managerial responsibility and researchers’ responsibility to ask questions that are not easily heard because they hurt the current organizational “truths.” Although the issue of what can be voiced (and acted) in organizations in which OL is the problematic (e.g. Argyris and Schön (1996) pointing toward the detrimental effects of the organizational “undiscussables”), I think there is a difference between a means directed at correcting people or dealing with the organizational practices at hand. These organizational practices are in contemporary societies transcending and connecting individual enterprises (or industries) and the world at large. This calls for a theoretical construct like OL but not in a behavioral understanding of learning in the sense of attempts to determine behavior because the strategies for making organizations sustainable or use human judgment in times of algorithms cannot be pinned down in any exact way but have to be created “as we walk.” This means that abilities to question the taken-for-granted and seek creative solutions need to be nurtured, which brings a learning theory inspired by pragmatism into the picture (see, for example, Arjaliés et al., 2013; Elkjaer, 2018; Kelemen et al., 2019). This is OL thought and applied in light of an understanding of humans that are able to not only adapt and adopt but to critical think and act and in which there is more at stake than mere profit in terms of immediate financial gains but also a sustainable world and responsible management. To work on these grounds, I believe, is researchers’ responsibility, because we are (by definition) not in the business for profit but to help nurture what is best for societies. We cannot act as agents for some part (e.g. organizations and management) of societies but have the obligation to think and act in wider instrumentalities of knowledge.
The discussion of what should be the future of OL is not so much a matter of here-and-now relevance to organizations but to see learning as a method for developing and maintaining critical thinking that is relevant in this encompassing way of thinking of OL (see, for example, Elkjaer and Nickelsen, 2015). OL needs to both include the bigger picture, technology, globalization (or de-globalization) and competition and the smaller picture, the relevance to individual enterprises and its development of technology, globalization, and competition but in a way in which the enterprises see themselves as part of the bigger picture. In order to do so, organizational participants and researchers that are able to act responsible and act with the constructive and critical voices are needed.
In this sense, it is an acknowledgment of OL as a matter of persons’ learning in organizations but not in any assumed predictable way but ascribing to continuous openness toward what may be changed and enhanced in the current workplace, and how this is part of something larger, a world in which we are all a part. I wish to finish by quoting a female psychoanalyst, Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976), whom I interviewed many years ago about her work on gender and the need for a “flexibility of mind”: We human beings span an enormous reach in our ability to concentrate. We can concentrate on smaller and larger things. We have an ability for that. It is a question about gathering oneself and remember to be flexible. To be able to move back and forth from a smaller to a larger matter and not stay within trivial matters. [Elkjær, 1988]
It is this connectedness of individual enterprises with the wider worlds of organizing and learning that I see the future of the field. This is the relevance to practitioners, which in the long run amounts to the development of OL as a relevant theoretical construct and the field comprising of its responsible researchers.
Conclusion
The trigger for doing the research reported in this article was a sense that the field of OL is vanishing as a field of research. This sense was not justified when embarking on a quantitative research question addressing the number of publications, on the contrary. The publication pattern has, however, changed within the last few years, and ML is no longer the primary outlet for OL research, TLO is. Researching the content, it is possible to trace a pattern in which OL research is addressing behavioral adaptation to organizational goals. When asked about the future, respondents propose to include a wider world of societal challenges like climate changes, widespread digitalization, and managerial responsibility. The results are discussed against a general plea for organization and management studies to be of more relevance to practitioners and practice. I propose that relevance cannot be assessed solely as an immediate applicability of research but need to include research to be more open-ended, which may be answered by a pragmatist inspired theory of learning with its aim to research current uncertainties in a creative and imaginative way. This, I propose, will in the long run be both of immediate and future relevance to not only practice and practitioners but also to researchers, because it involves engaging in critique due to its questioning the taken-for-granted and as such be potentially thought-provoking. This way forward may even be able to bring OL research back into ML.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The paper is dedicated to Mark Easterby-Smith (1948–2020) to honor his great contributions to the field of organizational learning. Thank you, Mark for all the laughs and good times we shared.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
