THE HOUSEHOLD AS A LEARNING ORGANIZATION

Abstract

Economic research shows that a complex entity such as a household, may be sometimes reduced to individual transactional decisions. The same is true in this paper, since the learning capacity of a household is understood as the sum of the capacities of household members. It turns out that household members function just like members of an organization (employees of a company/organisation). The question arises: what characteristics of households and their members (taking into account the functions they perform) are conducive to the household learning process and the development of household ability to use the potential of their members to perform in the market better than others, i.e. to respond more effectively to the turbulences occurring in the market. The hypotheses proposed in the study are related to the authors’ belief that: firstly, households can be treated as organizations; secondly, households have the ability to learn; thirdly, households can use their learning ability in order to adapt to changes occurring in the turbulent external environment. The objective was to: determine the characteristics of households which, when an interdisciplinary approach is applied, can be treated as organizations; define the features, which enable households to learn; define the requirements that have to be met to enable the households to apply their acquired knowledge and experience to make decisions leading to the planned changes in their behaviour;verify empirically the key determinants of the household learning process.The range of problems addressed by the paper belongs to the field of interdisciplinary studies dedicated to changes in households’ market behaviour resulting from the pressures exerted by the turbulent environment. The paper employed methods of critical literature analysis regarding the following: organization and management, operations in the market, as well as the system and benchmarking analyses. Additionally, the authors applied a questionnaire survey to provide data for the statistical analysis of co-dependencies of qualitative characteristics.