Covenantal Learning: What Can Judaism Teach Business about Learning?

Abstract

It has become almost cliche for those addressing modern business to invoke Drucker’s (1969) declaration of the ‘knowledge economy.’ Work’s fluid nature, the global economy’s hypercompetitiveness and the demand for innovation are clarion calls for learning in organizations. Over the past 20 years, recognition of ‘knowledge workers’ has sparked the burgeoning discourse in organizational learning and knowledge management (OL/KM) centering on how learning happens within (and by) organizations, and how knowledge is created, stored, transferred and retrieved. As with any new area of inquiry, OL/KM struggles to mature and gain identity. Some theorists have focused on technology, others on social considerations, others on how individuals learn and still others on how organizations themselves learn. Diversity has led to debate, particularly dissentious debate, over terms, concepts, processes and purposes (Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2011). Learning and knowledge have always been thorny terms which elude clear definition (Sarason, 2004). Philosophical ambiguity has fueled multiple trajectories of discourse.