Critical Review of Organizational Learning

The existence of positive literature on organizational learning has been remarkable since 1970s’. The literature has frequently put emphasis on the positive impacts of organizational learning such as creating knowledge, increasing capacity, improving performance, developing talent and providing competitive advantage. Furthermore, it has been stated that organizations implementing organizational learning practices, have structures which employees have continuously been learning and developing their capacities. In recent years, unlike the existing studies emphasizing the positive outcomes of organizational learning, it is noteworthy that there are also studies looking at the concept of organizational learning from critical perspective. In critical studies it has been questioned that whether organizations really learn, whether there is an organizational structure in which organizational learning constantly occurs and also whether there is a demand for continuously learning or not. The conceptual framework of this study is composed of related literature review of organizational learning and learning organization, and accordingly the organizational learning concept has been evaluated from a more critical perspective. In this study, examining the organizational learning concept with a critical view, it has been analyzed the unexpected outcomes of organizational learning from five different aspects such as suspect of reciprocity, resistance, barriers to learning, forgetting and unlearning.