Learning Theory: The Pandemic Research Challenge
探讨新冠疫情对组织学习理论四个分支（组织惯例、绩效反馈、替代学习、联盟）的挑战，指出疫情揭示了理论假设的局限，并呼吁学者开展新研究以推动理论发展。
Organizational learning theory examines how organizations change routine behaviours as a function of their goals and experience (Levitt and March, 1988). Research built on learning theory has assembled much evidence on how organizations adapt to their environments (e.g., Gavetti et al., 2012). Learning acts both as an underlying assumption in other theories and as a theory on its own, and is used in organizational theory, strategy, and entrepreneurship. This foundational role means that a reassessment of learning theory is consequential for the wider field of management, not just for scholars specialized in learning theory. The Covid-19 pandemic poses challenges to four branches of learning theory – organizational routines, performance feedback, vicarious learning, and coalitions – and this commentary explains how each challenge could inspire new research in this area. One may argue that pandemics are rare and unworthy of special attention, but this would be wrong in two ways. First, pandemics are not rare. Spanish Flu killed more than 40 million 100 years ago, HIV/AIDS killed 35 million in 40 years, and Ebola, SARS, and MERS are recent pandemics that suddenly halted. Research on each one is important because pandemics cause fundamental changes to organizations and communities, with effects seen decades later (Rao and Greve, 2018). Second, pandemics reveal assumptions behind our theoretical mechanisms that we rarely question, allowing creation of new theory and integration of new evidence. We should therefore examine this pandemic for its theoretical importance and substantive impact. To improve efficiency and increase economies of scale, organizations develop routines ranging from production sequences to foundational practices that flexibly handle rare situations (Pentland and Rueter, 1994). Routines gain endurance from repetition and path-dependence from gradual modification. Research on routines has not examined what happens when work-from-home tears an organization into pieces, making learning disjointed and individualized because the shared observation of routine execution and outcomes no longer happens. With workers separated from the workplace and each other, but joined with their families, their workplace routines are disrupted and replaced with improvisation. Similarly, when work-from-home ends, routines may be re-established, replaced, or altered. We do not know how the work-from-home improvisation will function or what will happen to the workplace routines when work-from-home ends. Research on organizational routines has used qualitative analysis to discover new phenomena and develop theory accordingly (Feldman, 2000), and such work is urgent now. Lessons can be drawn from how organizations have reorganized themselves, and still functioned with some degree of normality. Because research on routines typically makes significant advances through inductive studies of a phenomenon as it develops, the qualitative studies should start immediately. In the long run, we need studies of all methodologies examining the dismantled and reassembled organization. What are the consequences for work, employees, and maintenance of structure, processes, and routines? If the routines are imperfectly reassembled because they are forgotten or because work-from-home was better, does that signal the end of organizations to structure work? After all, the use of routines is an important reason that organizations are a preferred mode of organizing production. Organizations compare performance and aspiration levels on multiple goals, and this performance feedback results in problemistic search for new behaviours (Greve, 2003). Organizations have stable goal structures with generic goals (like ROA) or goals specific to an industry (like aircraft safety), and sometimes the goals conflict with each other. Organizational goals interact in ways that reflect their importance to the organization (Gaba and Greve, 2019), with goals drawing attention when performance is below the aspiration level. This research has not examined what happens following the sudden introduction of new and potentially temporary goals, as when a pandemic imposes unknown health and safety concerns. Some organizations give customer safety goals similar priority as profitability goals, and progressive labour laws afford safe working conditions to many, but the pandemic raises questions about how to re-prioritize safety goals and to handle more goals than usual. Even customer safety goals are best known to be important when they are familiar and durable, such as the safe operation of aircraft. Shocks like a pandemic are different because they arrive suddenly and may also halt suddenly, as the SARS pandemic did. Organizations may treat such goals as temporary, making it is unclear how much they will invest to solve shortfalls. How organizations respond to safety and other goals introduced by a pandemic is unknown. If new goals are abruptly introduced and the importance of these goals may change over time, the usual process of handling problems revealed by poor performance to avoid future problems is suddenly in question. Decision-makers learn from the past because they expect the future to be similar. If they think that the future will be the same as the pre-pandemic past, why should they learn from the pandemic? If they think that the future will be the same as the pandemic present, how much of the pre-pandemic learning will they retain? We need to know how organizations respond, for the sake of understanding pandemic responses and because such temporarily important goals may be more frequent than has been acknowledged. Vicarious learning (e.g., observational or indirect learning) is particularly important when seeking to resolve uncertainty about novel and consequential actions, resulting in the diffusion of technological or managerial innovations (Baum et al., 2000). Organizations engaging in vicarious learning assume that uncertainty is shared but early adopters have superior information, and hence, are worth imitating. Shocks like a pandemic overturn this assumption as the ignorance of others becomes common knowledge. Organizations observe a diversity of responses and are unable to use the normal signs of relevance and credibility – proximity, network ties, and status. Other organizations acting early could mean that they are better informed, or misinformed, or risk tolerant. Given these layers of uncertainty, it is unclear whether and how vicarious learning occurs during and after a pandemic. Our knowledge of vicarious learning includes how (1) learning from observation and communication differ, (2) similarity creates reference groups, and (3) network ties direct learning. Although it is hard to imagine vicarious learning disappearing in a high-uncertainty situation such as a pandemic, all three components of vicarious learning theory are in question. We should suspend our prior understanding and examine vicarious learning processes anew. Examining how organizations vicariously learn to take actions to protect workers and maintain production, and how they handle the disruption of the pandemic, will give insights that inform vicarious learning research more generally. Vicarious learning evidence has accumulated in social systems under limited uncertainty and stress, and for that reason it is likely incomplete. The connection between organizational learning and coalition building among managers has seen relatively little empirical attention (Gavetti et al., 2012). The scholarly inattention to this issue is because coalitions are often not highly consequential. Organizations avoid controversy, so building a coalition willing to support unusual actions is difficult unless these actions are already promoted by a social movement or part of a diffusion process. In a pandemic, the limits on the actions that an organization can take are weakened by the extreme environment. Legitimation pressures are weaker because less is taken for granted, and past strategies and structures are less constraining because the pandemic triggers problemistic search. The increased ability to engage in experimental or controversial actions does not mean that many organizations will do so. Some organizations build coalitions supporting actions that are experimental or even contrarian to others. Are these organizations that have leadership teams with lower tenure, greater diversity, or backgrounds that are unconventional in some way? Are they organizations with centralized and secure leadership? As organizations facing the pandemic chooses different paths to solve the problems it brings, researchers can investigate the sources of these differences. Tracing them back to the background and experiences of decision-makers and their coalition building will be the next step forward in research. Though it is difficult to predict when or how the pandemic will recede, it is easy to appreciate that it affords important lessons for organizational learning. Many actions that organizations learn to take in response to a pandemic are meant to save lives of workers, customers, and others, but organizational learning theory does not assume that they result in a steady advance. Scholars should help advance knowledge on how effective actions are discovered by organizations doing problemistic search when facing new goals and are distributed throughout society by organizations learning vicariously from (we hope) the best early responses. The effects of pandemics and other crises can be made milder through organizational learning. Because the most serious pandemics happen rarely, however, we cannot assume that all organizations will retain these lessons. Organizational scholars should document the effective learning patterns, and through our teaching make sure that organizations are ready not just for the everyday organizational learning in the absence of a crisis, but also for the next pandemic. This paper has benefited from a helpful exchange with Gideon Markman, from all co-authors who have shaped my thinking on organizational learning, and from Jim March.