Market feedback and group learning within organisations

Abstract

This paper proposes a model to represent the organisational learning process at group level. The paper first sets up the analytical framework from the variety of research purposes and epistemological premises characterising the multidiscipline context in which scholars study cognitive activities of collective agents. In this theoretical ground, it is shown how to deduce from relevant literature and empirical contexts an architectural proposal for the representation of the group learning process. According to this architecture, a group within an organisation uses heuristics while performing cognitive activities activated from a market feedback different from that expected. The structure of the learning process consequent to a perceived gap between desired and measured outcome suggests a strong analogy with greedy structures of some heuristics in artificial intelligence, and starts off some methodological discussion over the simulation of the whole process.