Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management: Learning by Populations of Organizations (The International Library of Critical Writings on Business and Management)

This major series presents by theme an authoritative selection of the most important articles on business and management, an area that is experiencing an explosion of increasingly diverse literature.

This series synthesises this research in one easily accessible reference source which will be invaluable for students, academics and policymakers.

Each volume has been prepared by a leading specialist who has carefully selected the key papers on a particular topic and written a new, original introduction to the literature.

For this three-volume set the editors have selected many of the most influential articles published since 1984 on the topics of knowledge management and the improvement of organizational learning, developmental learning by individual organizations and the development of populations of organizations.

Many of the articles in the first volume are trailblazers in the field of knowledge management; they discuss ways of fostering learning, managing knowledge and extracting economic benefits from knowledge. This second volume investigates how individual organizations learn: topics covered include cognitive versus behavioural learning, interpretation, incremental change and reorientation, and learning from success and failure. The third volume follows the development of the academic study of populations of organizations: it explores both behavioural and cognitive learning processes from the point of view of industries, geographic neighbourhoods and networks.

New and authoritative introductions to each volume by the editors offer a comprehensive overview and informative discussion of the issues.

William H. Starbuck is Professor-in-Residence at the University of Oregon
Suzanne G. Tilleman is a Ph.D. Student in Management at the University of Oregon, USA.