The War of the Woods: Facilitators and Impediments of Organizational Learning Processes
研究MacMillan Bloedel公司如何从抵制变革到脱离行业主导范式并开发新方案，扩展了组织学习的多层次框架，识别出两个基于行动的学习过程，并引入“合法性陷阱”概念解释组织过度依赖制度化知识的问题。
This study examines unfolding organizational learning processes at MacMillan Bloedel, a company which, after years of resisting stakeholder pressures for change, disengaged from the field’s dominant paradigm and developed a new solution. We elaborate the Crossan, Lane and White multi–level framework of organizational learning processes, finding support for the four feedforward learning processes they identified (intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing), and adding two action–based learning processes: ‘ attending ’ and ‘ experimenting ’. We introduce the concept of a ‘ legitimacy trap ’ to describe an organization’s over–reliance on institutionalized knowledge when external challenges arise. The trapped organization rejects external challenges of its legitimacy when it perceives the sources of those challenges to be illegitimate. Feedforward learning is blocked as the organization escalates its commitment to its institutionalized interpretations and actions. Taking a grounded theory approach, we discuss how individuals attend to new stimuli and engage in intuiting about them, how groups interpret, experiment with and integrate new solutions, and how the firm validates and institutionalizes the successful solution. Facilitators and impediments of each of these learning processes are identified. Our additions to the model recognize the importance of context in organizational learning processes, and suggest how power may impact organizational learning.