Individual Learning and Organizational Routine: Emerging Connections

Abstract

The intent of this review essay is to draw attention to a striking convergence of work on learning being done-separately until now-by students of organizational learning and by psychologists interested in memory and in skilled performance. Issues being raised in study of organizational learning are nicely complemented by current developments in psychology. They provide both confirmation of what organization theorists have intuited about individuals and a more differentiated understanding of skill-learning and memory that should enrich organizational theorizing and observation. The plan of essay is to sketch an interesting example of recent work on both organizational and psychological sides, then to discuss their points of contact. In Information and Organizations, Arthur L. Stinchcombe has made a large-scale effort to extract and reframe central organization theory assertions of major figures such as Schumpeter, Chandler, and Simon. He synthesizes them with insights derived from his own observations of manufacturing, oil extraction, construction, and, university administration to obtain a distinctive new perspective on organizations. The result is a very stimulating argument that variety of organizational forms we see about us are product of a fundamental organizational dynamic: seeking and processing of information about organization's key uncertainties. In effect, organizational structure is viewed as a design for organizational learning, for acquiring information about state of world and for improving what organization can do. The foundation of organizational capabilities, in Stinchcombe's view, are skills of its individual members. These he compares to small computer programs: the parts of an individual's skill which are completely routinized are parts that he or she does not have to think about once a routine is switched on in worker's mind, it goes on end without further consultation of higher faculties (p. 63). The view is somewhat similar to that of Nelson and Winter (1982). Information about uncertainties (the news as Stinchcombe often calls it) serves two purposes with respect to repertoire of skills: in building/modifying its contents, routines themselves, and in switching activation among those routines potentially relevant to current context. Building and modifying repertoire are fundamental activities because they embody learning in routines, thus constituting a major form of organizational memory. The steady refinement of that repertoire generates much of performance improvement we see in learning curve research (as in article in this issue by Argote and Epple). The rate of such improvement can be dramatic, which causes Stinchcombe to remark that at beginning of a production run there is not much one can do that is as inefficient as buying same activities today that one bought yesterday (p. 372/133).