European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) - Sub-Theme 33

June 28-July 3, 2010, Lisbon (Portugal)

A GLOBAL AGENDA FOR STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING IN TURBULENT TIMES

Co-Convenors

Elena P. Antonacopoulou, GNOSIS, University of Liverpool Management School,

United Kingdom, e.antonacopoulou@liv.ac.uk

WOLFGANG H. GÜTTEL, Johannes Kepler-University Linz, Austria, guettel@jku.at

JEROME MERIC, IAE, University de Tours – ESCEM Tours, France, jerome.meric@univ-tours.fr 

Call for Papers

Why do organizations fail to learn from failure? Why do organizations defy conventional industry wisdom and implement their insights to remain sustainable over many years? Why are some organizations better than others in responding to crisis? Why do organizations that reconfigure their practices experience tension between stability and change? These questions illustrate one of the biggest challenges in organization studies; our ongoing attempts to understand and support organizations in their efforts to learn and unlearn.

The current global financial crisis makes even more pertinent the need to understand better why lessons learned seem to have made little difference to the relative readiness to cope with the crisis. It is not simply that mistakes are repeated. The very repetitiveness of the experience of having to live through another economic downturn with all its social, political, technological and human costs, reflects the different approach to learning that is also called for. It is for all intents and purposes a different kind of crisis and one that provides little affordance for replicating past measures or relying on existing bodies of knowledge. Why are organizations so ill prepared when they are confronted with the unknown? Why does organizational memory play such a crucial role in organization's capacity to cope? Why, Why, Why?

The repetition of why-questions, aims to encourage organization and management scholars to also learn to pose different questions in their research practice and not only to seek to provide theoretical explanations that tentatively answer questions. It invites management and organizational learning scholars especially to extend their engagement with established concepts such as organizational memory, knowledge management, learning organization and to experiment with learning-in-practise. By acknowledging that learning and unlearning entail a great deal of practising, this provides scope for extending hitherto established orientations of learning as exploration and exploitation. It introduces a third dimension that connects these two and provides scope for new possibilities as well. It goes beyond the relational emphasis placed by ambidexterity. Exploration and exploration connect through experimentation. Whilst exploration seeks to engage with the unknown and exploitation relies on existing knowledge to develop new solutions, experimentation focuses on practising. Practising is about repetition as a route to perfection through endorsing difference. At the core of practising is unlearning. To-date conceptualizations of unlearning present it as a process of discarding prior knowledge from organizational memory. Unlearning from the perspective of experimentation and practising reflects the drive towards extending possibilities for action. This marks a renewed focus on the strategic role of organizational learning research in response to turbulent times.

This perspective is useful in order to revisit questions such as why does learning take place in organizations? It also prompts a more pragmatic orientation in analyzing why does learning matter to organizational performance?  The wave of orientations in the existing literature focusing on firm resources, knowledge, dynamic capabilities and practices has been most valuable in generating a variety of explanations and responses to this question. But they have also proven insufficient in articulating a substantive response to the question of why learning does not take place in organizations?

In short, we believe that understanding the strategic dynamics of learning across levels of analysis is a key feature during turbulent times and one that will renew a global research agenda in future strategic organizational learning research. This sub-theme, aims to:

·    Make the case for the importance of studying the strategic dynamics of learning and unlearning

·    Provide more actionable consequences to organizational learning research: by concentrating on capabilities, routines, rule systems and practices

·    Help explain the emergence of organizing and managing, adopting a more dynamic conceptualisation of concepts such as that of organizational memory

·    Outline some practical research considerations about how to study the dynamic nature of processes by considering how repetition differs from replication especially in supporting strategic organizational learning

Deadline for submission of short papers to sub-themes: January 10, 2010

For instructions for submitting short papers

and further information: www.egosnet.org

The Convenors

Elena Antonacopoulou is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the University of Liverpool Management School and Director of GNOSIS. Her principal research interests include change and learning practices in organizations and the development of new methodologies for studying social complexity. She works collaboratively with leading researchers internationally and with practitioners and policy-makers in co-creating knowledge for action. She has served the EGOS Board for two terms (6 years) and has been elected in several positions at Board and Executive levels at the Academy of Management (USA) where she has now been appointed to lead the Practice Theme Committee. 

Wolfgang H. Güttel is Professor of Human Resource and Change Management at the Johannes Kepler-University Linz (Austria). He has also been affiliated with the Department of Technique and Management at the University of Padua (Italy). Previously, he was Professor at the Universities of Kassel and Hamburg (Germany), AIM Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Management at the WU Vienna. His main research interest is strategic learning in the fields of dynamic capabilities, ambidexterity and replication.

Jérôme Méric is Associate Professor at the IAE (Institute of Business Administration), University of Tours and Vice-Director of the CERMAT Research Laboratory (Center of Management Research in Touraine). He is also Contributing Academic Professor at ESCEM Business School (Tours-Poitiers). His main research interests cover formal and informal dynamics and practices of control in organizations. He has published in French speaking and international journals and books. He has recently completed a 3 year term on the executive of MED-Academy of Management.