Crossan, M., Lane, H., & White, R. (1999). An Organizational Learning Framework: From Intuition to Institution. The Academy of Management Review,24(3), 522-537.
I’ve read it before, but enjoyed reading it again. The classic paper of Crossan, Lane and White on Organizational Learning is food for thought both for academia and practice-oriented organisations.
I enjoy the frameworks given in this paper: the four processes of learning which includes personal, group and organizational level : Intuiting (personal), Intepreting (personal), Integrating (group) and institutionalizing (organization). The paper effectively shown how these processes can interact to generate organizational learning. They maintain the importance of the individual being a cornerstone in the organizational learningprocess. However: routines, diagnostic systems and rules and procedures must develop as a result of the individual and group-level processes. This is where many organizations probably struggle. Thus institutionalization can lead to barriers for organizational learning.
For strategic management, this implies that all levels must be taken into account when developing and deploying strategy. As strategic management (SM) is more involved in the organization than classic strategic planning (Whittington, 2019), SM needs to link into learningprocesses on all levels.
The article has been cited 1650 times in academic texts. Which is quite a lot. And the popularity has been growing (Web of Science). Definitely one to read! Do you agree?
Davis, M. (1971). That’s Interesting: Towards a
Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences,1(4),
309.
Today I read the essay by Murray Davies “That’s interesting!”.
Which was – really interesting! The central
tenant of the essay is to answer the question of “How do
theories which are generally considered interesting differ from theories which
are generally considered non-interesting?” The answer is given promptly in the
opening summary: “Interesting theories are those which deny certain assumptions
of their audience, while non-interesting theories are those which affirm
certain assumptions of their audience”. Davis then walks through a number of various
examples this can be done and gives historical examples, including among others
Marx, Freud, Kant, and Durkheim. This is a really nice read – written in a
clear and interesting fashion by someone who is able to reference a large variety
of examples, especially from within social sciences.
Usefulness: clarifies thoughts on how to position a paper or hypothesis which has the remote possibility to actually generate some interest – not just fill up some more storage space in an eternal it-cloud.
Best quote:
“A theorist is considered great, not because his theories are true, but because
they are interesting. Those who carefully and exhaustively verify trivial
theories are soon forgotten; whereas those who cursorily and expediently verify
interesting theories are long remembered.”
Mellahi, K., Frynas, J., Sun, P., & Siegel, D. (2016). A Review of the Nonmarket Strategy Literature: Toward a Multi-Theoretical Integration. Journal of Management,42(1), 143-173.
Reading outside your immediate research-focus can be both bewildering and very rewarding. My focus the past years has been on strategy in regards to public organisations. Certainly there are frequent references to strategy in the private sector – but actually diving into an article like this one, is both bewildering and rewarding.
Superficially, one might think non-market strategy and strategy in public agencies should be quite similar, since public agencies do not interact with markeds the same way as businesses. The illusion of similarity soon dissipates as you read about what non-market strategy is all about. I’ll return to that. Burrowing deeper, however, there are some possible bridges between the literature on non-market strategy in market-place organisations and public agencies. I’ll return to that as well.
First things first. The article delves into research on non-market strategy: especially CSR and CPA (corporate social responsibility and corporate political activity). It details how a selection of 214 articles was chosen and how they were analyzed. 163 of the papers were empirical and 51 were conceptual. Of the empirical papers, 153 were focused on the performance outcomes of CSR and 51 on CPA. There was, in other words, a large amount of research which the authors used as data for this article. The result is a plethora of details which at times is quite a challenge to follow. However: the authors supply an integrative framework which comes to assistance in ordering the huge amount of perspectives.
The article details which theoretical frameworks the underlying articles have used. The most common are Agency Theory, Institutional Theory, Resource-based view (RBV), Resource-dependence theory (RDT), Stakeholder Theory and a group of “Others”. The overview of the use of these theoretical perspectives alone is very helpful in gaining oversight over the academic field of non-market strategy. Then the authors also present an “integrative model of the nonmarket strategy-performance relationship”. Such models clarify and give the readers a mental image of how elements fit together – at least in this paper’s discussion.
A very
interesting chapter was Insights
From Related Non-Business Disciplines – where there are also possible
links to social contract and Habermasian theories as possible avenues forward.
Leaving the directly market-place related content
aside, there is still a lot to gain in this article on strategy for public
sector. I will certainly look closer into how theoretical perspectives are
applied in some of the references papers. Another perspective is the focus on how CPA and CSR may be complementary, the
discussion on mediating factors between CPA, CSR and performance and not least
the effect of contextual factors (legal, political, and social). All these dimensions are in differing ways
applicable also to public agencies
Therefore, for me this article was very helpful –
and it gives me a ton of new articles to look further into.
I put a lot of work into gathering data for the part of this article detailing strategic management in Norwegian government agencies and have learned a lot from collaborating with brilliant scholars.
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to analyse the design and implementation of strategic planning and performance management in governmental agencies in two Nordic countries, Finland and Norway. The Nordic countries are an interesting study from a comparative perspective because while they are commonly assumed to have been high-intensity new public management reformers, they are commonly assumed also to have a distinct public management tradition. Moreover, these two countries are interesting to study because within the Nordic public management tradition, Finland and Norway represent two different public management traditions. Finland belongs to the Eastern Nordic public management tradition, with an emphasis on decentralisation and agency autonomy, while Norway belongs to the Western Nordic public management tradition, with an emphasis on hierarchical governance and hence much performance management and reporting. Therefore, we expected to find more decentralised strategic management and emphasis on evaluation in Finland and more central, planning-like strategic management and reporting in Norway. Our comparison shows that both countries had mandatory strategic planning and utilised decentralised strategic planning in government agencies. The stronger legal orientation in the public administration in Finland, however, made strategic changes more complicated in Finland than in Norway.
Ongaro, Edoardo and van Thiel, Sandra. “Languages and Public Administration in Europe” In The Palgrave Handbook of Public Administration in Europe, edited by Edoardo Ongaro and Sandra van Thiel, 61-98. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place ” George Bernard Shaw.
Ongaro and van Thiel’s article in The Palgrave Handbook of Public Administration in Europe raises the question whether we understand eachother when we use the same key concepts in the study of public administration.
The first section outlines the idea behind the article. Even if English is a lingua franca in academia, the various authors’ culture and linguistic background may influence their perception of concepts. Then Ongaro and van Thiel lets a number of scholars in the field reflect on how the following concepts can be understood/interpreted in the various languages in Europe: accountability, agency/agencification, governance, leadership, management/ public management, public administration, performance, policy, public values, security. In addition they reflect on central concepts in their respective languages that do not communicate well into English.
The result is a very instructive demonstration that the core concepts of public administration, have a lot of different challenges in being translated into various languages – a fact which poses a challenge to for instance teaching public administration in the vernacular languages. Trying to stick to your mother tongue might be difficult when communicating insights from the international academic arena.
English is a dominant language in the international academic sphere. I believe precise communication across cultural and linguistic borders is attainable, however – there might be an interesting richness of diverse meanings which are more or less hidden behind the use of the same English key concepts.
The article gives insight into how not only obscure phrases, but also key concepts might create communication challenges for academics originating in different countries and cultures. Next time I read an article or speak with a colleague from another country – I might just be haunted by the question: are we speaking about the same thing even if we are using the same concepts? Hopefully – that will lead to interesting clarifications and new insights.
Study in progress 