Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations

PART I: The foundations of mainstream views on learning and knowledge creation in organizations: systems thinking

The two chapters in this Part outline the key assumptions, usually unquestioned, upon which reasoning about learning and knowledge creation in organizations is generally based.

First, the organization and its individual members are thought of as two different explanatory levels so that the question of knowledge has to be dealt with at two levels. Second, organizations themselves, as well as learning and knowledge creation by, or within them, are all thought of as systems. This focuses attention on interactions between sub-systems of which organizations are composed and between organizations as systems. Groups and individual members ...