Organizational Learning

This chapter comments on organizational learning research produced by scholars who studied or taught at Stanford University during the last third of the 20th century. Challenging classical learning models, Stanford scholars have demonstrated how cognitive and social processes attenuate connections between environmental action and the lessons learned from it. They have demonstrated how goals change over time as a partial Junction of prior performance and the importance of temporal processes in learning rates. They have shown how rules and routines encode only imperfectly lessons learned from organizational action. Their research has deepened and enriched our understanding of organizational learning.