Communities of Practice: Facilitating Social Learning while Frustrating Organizational Learning

Despite its almost fifty years of existence, the literature on organizational learning is still growing. Over the years, the topic has been approached from various angles. Some scholars have been mostly interested in learning processes as adaptation with typically organizational routines as its outcomes (for example Simon and March, 1958; March and Olsen, 1976; Cyert and March, 1963; Levitt and March, 1988). Others focus mainly on the cognitive rather than the behavioural aspects that typify the learning of organizations (for example Hedberg, 1981; Argyris and Schon, 1978). With the advent in the 1980s of Management Information Systems, IS scholars joined the organizational learning debate by introducing an information processing perspective to learning (for example Huber, 1991; Duncan and Weiss, 1979; Walsh and Ungson, 1991), stimulating people to think of ways to technically support learning processes and storage and retrieval of organizational knowledge bases. At the start of the 1990s, yet another perspective was introduced within the literature on organizational learning. This time the topic gained attention from ethnographers studying organizational behaviour. Based on theories derived from Vygotsky and Piaget, the idea was introduced that learning is essentially social.