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Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

This paper aims to challenge the alleged gender-neutral character of Argyris and Schön’s theory of organizational learning (1978). While theories in organizational science seem gender neutral at the surface, a closer analysis reveals they are often based on men’s experiences.

This paper uses the method of gender subtext analysis, centering on gendering and its interaction with gender, class and race.

The dichotomous learning scheme of Argyris and Schön, in which a limited learning approach with alleged masculine values and interaction styles is opposed to an ideal learning approach with feminine values and interaction styles, is related to Bendl’s subtexts of feminization and of unconscious exclusion and neglect in organizational theories. To overcome the binary character of the theory, a gradient and contextualized approach to organizational learning is proposed.

This paper is the first to apply gender subtext analysis to theories of organizational learning and, thus, to analyze their gender subtext.

Research on sustainability in higher education has focused on environmental management of the university campus, case studies and examples of good practice. Although the value and contribution of these initiatives has been articulated, little holistic and structural transformation of universities has been achieved so far. This paper aims to explore different theoretical frameworks to better understand and improve the effectiveness of organisational change processes towards sustainability in universities.

The combination of different theoretical approaches on organisational learning such as organisational learning theory, the idea of expansive learning at work, the ideal of the learning organisation and transformative learning theory are reviewed in this paper. These ideas in combination with leadership for sustainability and education for sustainability lead to an integrative model that links theory and practice, cultural and social aspects influencing learning, and the ability of individuals to critically reflect and challenge existing worldviews to learn and develop new practices.

The theoretical foundations and model presented seek to provide useful theoretical basis with which to better understand the process of transformation towards sustainability in higher education. This involves a continuous process of learning to rethink existing practices and worldviews by individuals within the organisation, which lead to community learning, which in turn lead to organisational learning. Six key implications for action have also been identified.

Little research exists that uses organisational learning to inform the design and development of the research reporting on the achievements, opportunities and challenges emerged during the change process towards embedding sustainability in higher education. The suggested framework is envisaged as an integrative theoretical framework that can help understand the “how to”, thus the learning processes associated with embedding sustainability in the core activities of universities.

The purpose of this paper is to juxtapose chaos theory with organizational learning theory to examine whether public organizations co-evolve into a new order or rather institutionalize newly gained knowledge in times of a highly complex public health crisis.

The research design utilizes the results from a survey administered to 200 emergency management and public health officials in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex.

The findings of this paper suggest that public entities were more likely to represent organizational learning through the coordination of professionals, access to quality information, and participation in daily communication. Leadership was associated with the dissemination of knowledge through the system rather than the development of new standard operating procedures (as suggested by chaos theory and co-evolution).

There are limitations to this study given the purposive sample of emergency management and public health officials employed in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex.

The authors find that public organizations that learn how to respond to unprecedented events through reliance on structure, leadership, and culture connect decision makers to credible information resulting in organizational learning.

As a result, public administrators need to focus and rely on their organization’s capacity to receive and retain information in a crisis.

This research contributes to our understanding of organizational learning in public organizations under highly complex public health situations finding decisions makers rely on both organizational structure and culture to support the flow of credible information.

The paper's purposes are to establish organizational learning theory as evolving from the theoretical and empirical study of organizations and to build grounded theory explaining organizational learning in schools.

Implementation of instructional technology as a process of organizational learning was explored at an elementary school. Findings from qualitative data revealed determinants of organization learning discussed as grounded theory, building on the relationship between social psychology and structural systemic aspects of organizational theory.

Five elements influenced organizational learning: priority of the learning in the organization, consistency and breadth of information distribution, unpredictability or uncertainty, the ease of learning new routines (how to) and the difficulty of learning new conceptual frameworks (why).

Assessing the type of change (routine or conceptual) and the adequacy of information distribution can predict the ease of organizational change. Identifying existing beliefs or procedures that impede new learning can explain lack of progression, and prioritizing the learning through both words and action can facilitate the process.

The paper develops organizational learning theory in schools as contextual indicators and conditions with theoretical roots in the structural technical and social cognitive study of organizations.

Drawing from organizational learning theory, social exchange theory and positive psychology approach, this study aims to examine the relationship between commitment to learning and prosocial silence, as well as the mediating role of perceived organizational support (POS) in this relationship.

The authors used path analysis to examine the relationships between research variables. Data were collected from 275 employees of private sector companies in Turkey through an online survey platform. To test the proposed hypotheses, the authors conducted regression and mediation analyses using the bootstrapping method.

The results indicate that the organization’s commitment to learning positively and significantly impacts employee prosocial silence, and POS partially mediates this relationship.

Managers who aim to promote other-oriented and helping behavior in the organization should understand how prosocial silence can be golden. They should cultivate and model a learning mindset by focusing on strengths instead of weaknesses, reward experimentation and provide employees with timely feedback allowing them to think and reflect on their failures.

Although the dominant position of previous studies endorses the detrimental sides of organizational silence, less research has focused on employees’ prosocial silence behavior and the underlying mechanisms that may explain employees’ tendency to remain silent with helpful intent, a gap this research attempts to fill.

This is a case study paper. A major research goal of this study is to extend the existing theories of learning organization put forth in the 4I model by adding more complicated ideas to it. One minor goal of this research is to show that the first stage of organizational learning, “intuiting”, is the hardest to implement when starting a learning organization. Particular attention should be paid to this step, and with the addition of adult learning theory, the possibility of facing a negative situation should be reduced. A second less important goal is to explain how to assess organizational learning, and how the flow of single‐ and double‐loop learning takes place within a learning organization.

This study adopted a combination of qualitative and quantitative survey methods to study the effectiveness of the new mode of transformational activity practiced in Firm A.

Statistical evidence showed that the practice was successful. It solved the issue that expertise and top managers mostly protest against learning.

This paper brings a new and more adaptive perspective for building a learning organization upon existing organizational learning theories. Through this case study, the integration and transformation from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, intuition to institution (the 4i model), and individual level to organizational level are illustrated. The practices of single‐loop and double‐loop learning are also well depicted by this study.

This paper aims to examine the concept of learning organization (LO) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Its objective is to provide initial insight into the potential impact of cultural context on how business managers perceive and interpret the LO theory and practice.

The study was conducted in two phases; the first phase involved a focus group review and discussion of the LO concept and major LO models. With insights gained from the focus group discussions, the second phase of the study developed a number of hypotheses on the potential impact of national cultural orientations on the LO concept, which were tested with managerial responses to a survey.

While UAE managers viewed and interpreted the LO concept in several different ways, most qualitative comments emphasized the following four aspects of an LO: workplace learning, organizational learning, learning climate and learning structure. Both sets of data revealed strong linkages between dimensions of national culture and the LO concept. Organizational culture partially mediated the relationship between national cultural orientations and aspects of an LO. Potential barriers to the implementation of the LO concept as perceived by respondents were largely related to national cultural value orientations and organizational cultures. The findings suggested that Western LO models and measurement instruments do not fully capture the socio-cultural reality of UAE-based organizations and the manner in which they view and interpret the LO concept and practices in their specific context.

Being a preliminary and largely reflective in nature, the present study has relied more heavily upon the qualitative data than the survey data.

The findings of this study document the value of culture-specific criteria to monitor the performance of companies in their LO journey rather than using a standardized LO assessment model.

The study represents an initial attempt at enhancing the understanding of the impact of national culture on the development and application of the LO concept and the challenges it faces in the UAE context.

Theories of organizational learning and sustainability must be able to respond to contemporary social issues and accommodate, in some way, the multiplicity of perspectives that are present in society on these topics. One way of developing multi‐perspectival capacities in the scientific understandings is through the building of metatheory. Nowhere is this task more urgently needed than in the study of organisational sustainability. To be sustainable, organisations must not only meet economic, environmental, social and governance requirements but also learn to embody them in their practices and values even during times of turbulence and extraordinary upheaval. The purpose of this paper is to propose a metatheoretical approach to organizational sustainability that can accommodate this plurality.

Three important metatheoretical lenses – the developmental, internal‐external and learning lenses – are presented which have particular relevance to turbulent organizational environments and the transformational imperatives that arise from them. These lenses are then used individually and in combination to discuss several paradoxes related to learning and sustainability issues.

The growth, learning and sustainability paradoxes present a number of challenges to organisational learning capacities that can be usefully discussed within a metatheoretical context. The set of metatheoretical lenses identified here provide some new avenues for achieving authentic sustainability.

There are two important implications of metatheoretical discussion. The first is the opening up of new directions for middle‐range theory. The second is the capacity of metatheory to critically examine extant theories and research paradigms. Several issues are raised in this paper concerning the evaluation of current theories of organisational learning and sustainability.

The metatheoretical approach to learning and sustainability proposed here resolves some fundamental paradoxes facing organisations and it opens up new ways of conceptualising the radical transformations required to meet the sustainability challenges that are being faced in the twenty‐first century.