ABSTRACT
This paper argues that to talk about organisations learning is to reify and anthropomorphise organisations. Instead of thinking of an organisation as if it were a thing or a person it is closer to experience to think of an organisation as the patterning of people’s interactions with each other. This paper explores the assumptions that are being made when we talk about organisations or groups that learn, or about individuals learning in groups or organisations. It suggests an alternative to thinking in these ways, namely, that learning is an activity of interdependent people. If one takes the view an organisation is the organising activities of interdependent people, it leads to a particular perspective on learning. Much of the communicative and power relating activities of interdependent people takes the form of continually iterated patterns of repetition in which meaning and power figurations have the quality of stability which we call identity. But because of the nonlinear iterative nature of human interaction there is always the potential for small differences to be amplified into transformative shifts in identity. Learning is then understood as the emerging shifts in the patterning of human communicative interaction and power relating. Learning is the activity of interdependent people and can only be understood in terms of self-organising communicative interaction and power relating in which identities are potentially transformed. Individuals cannot learn in isolation and organisations can never learn.
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238This paper is one of a number in a special issue titled “The implications of complexity and chaos theories for organisations that learn”.That title immediately points to an important question, which one might pose in the following terms: do organisations learn or is it individuals and groups in organisations who learn? If one thinks that it is individuals and groups inside an organisation that learn then one focuses attention on individual and collective learning processes. If it is thought that it is organisations that learn then attention is focused on what it is about an organisation that makes learning possible.
A distinction along these lines is used by Easterby-Smith and Araujo (1999) to identify two strands in the literature to do with organisations and learning. They distinguish between the literature on organisational learning and that on the learning organisation. They say that the former “has concentrated on the detached observation and analysis of the processes involved in individual and collective learning inside organizations” (Easterby-Smith and Araujo, 1999, p. 2). The literature on the learning organisation, on the other hand, is concerned with “methodological tools which can help to identify, promote and evaluate the quality of learning processes inside organizations” (Easterby-Smith and Araujo, 1999, p. 2) and in so doing this literature identifies “templates, or ideal forms, which real organizations could attempt to emulate” (Easterby-Smith and Araujo, 1999, p. 2). Easterby-Smith and Araujo (1999) argue that there is a growing divide between the two strands. Those writing in the organisational learning tradition are interested in “understanding the nature and processes of learning” (Easterby-Smith and Araujo, 1999, p. 8). Those writing in the tradition of the learning organisation are more interested in “the development of normative models and methodologies for creating change in the direction of improved learning processes” (Easterby-Smith and Araujo, 1999, p. 8).
Easterby-Smith and Araujo (1999) distinguish between a technical and a social strand in the organisational learning literature. The technical strand takes the view that organisational learning is a matter of processing, interpreting and responding to quantitative and qualitative information, which is generally explicit and in the public domain. Key writers in this tradition are Argyris and Schon (1978) with their notions of single and double loop learning. The social strand focuses attention on how people make sense of their work practices (Weick, 1995). This strand utilises Polanyi’s distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge (Polanyi and Prosch, 1975). It focuses attention on the socially constructed nature of knowledge (Brown and Duguid, 1991), the political processes involved (Coopey, 1995), and the importance of cultural and socialisation processes (Lave and Wenger, 1991). The literature on the learning organisation also displays technical and social interests. The former tends to focus on interventions based on measurement and information systems, while the latter focuses on individual and group learning processes in a normative manner (Senge, 1990; Isaacs, 1999; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995).
For me, the claim that organisations learn amounts to both reification and anthropomorphism. I argue that organisations are not things because no one can point to where an organisation is – all one can point to is the artefacts used by members of organisations in their work together. In our experience, the organisation qua organisation arises as the patterning of our interactions with each other. I also argue that we depart from our direct experience when we think of the organisation 239as organism. To sustain the claim that an organisation is in any sense a living organism, we would need to point to where this living body is. Since an organisation is neither inanimate thing nor living body, in anything other than rather fanciful metaphorical terms, it follows that an organisation can neither think nor learn. But the alternative is not all that satisfactory either. To claim that it is only individuals who learn is to continue with the major Western preoccupation with the autonomous individual and to ignore the importance of social processes. One might try to deal with this objection by saying that it is both individuals and groups who learn. But that runs into the same objection as saying that organisations learn. The claim that groups learn is also both reification and anthropomorphism. A group, like any organisation or any other social institution for that matter, is the patterning of people’s interactions with each other and patterns can neither think nor learn. Furthermore, to talk about individuals who learn in organisations or in groups is also problematic because, once again, this implies that the group and the organisation exist somewhere as a different “place” or “level” to people. If this were not so, how could people be in a group or organisation? This paper explores the assumptions that are being made when we talk about organisations or groups that learn, or about individuals learning in groups or organisations. The paper will also suggest an alternative to thinking in these ways, namely, that learning is an activity of interdependent people.
I will be distinguishing, then, between two different ways of thinking about the individual and the group. The first separates individuals and groups as different levels of existence. This splitting of individual and organisation is central to the systems thinking that dominates the literature on learning and organisations. This is essentially a way of thinking in terms of dualisms or dualities. I want to contrast this with a way of thinking in terms of paradox in which individual and group/organisation are aspects of the same processes of interaction between people (Stacey, 2001). This way of thinking is built on the work of Mead (1934) and Elias (1939). For Mead, mind, self and society arise simultaneously and for Elias, the individual is the singular and the social is the plural of interdependent people. There are then no separate levels, only paradoxical processes of individuals forming the social while at the same time being formed by it. Learning is then to be thought of as the activity of interdependent people.
My colleagues and I (Stacey et al., 2000) have combined the work of Mead, Elias and others with insights from complexity theories to suggest what we have called a complex responsive processes theory of organisations. This paper will review how one might think of learning and organisations from this perspective. We have used some of the work in the complexity sciences as a source domain for analogies with human action, understood from the psychological/sociological theories of Mead and Elias. I will not be referring to chaos theory in this paper for the following reason. In chaos theory the term “chaos” has a precise mathematical meaning. It defines a particular dynamic, the strange attractor, which is a feature of deterministic nonlinear equations operating at certain parameter values. Since chaos is a property of deterministic rather than evolving relationships it cannot have anything to do with learning. Human action is not deterministic – it evolves. By definition that which is deterministic cannot learn. Chaos theory can, therefore, only ever be used as a loose 240metaphor for anything in the human domain. Some types of complex system simulation do, however, demonstrate the capacity to evolve and it is, therefore, to these that we might turn for analogies with human action.
