On Organizational Learning

This book is essential for anyone who needs to understand how organizations work, evolve, and learn. In this new edition, Argyris discusses vital topics of management research, such as tacit knowledge and management, so reflecting the evolving field of organizational learning. Focusing on learning and organizational politics, the book addresses the key issues of: Organizational learning and Action Science. Organizational effectiveness and what inhibits it. Organizational development and human resource activities. Usable knowledge and how it is inhibited.

Table of Contents:
List of figures. List of tables. Acknowledgments. Preface. Introduction: The Evolving Field of Organizational Learning. Part I: Organizational Defences: 1. Making Sense of Limited Learning. 2. Tacit Knowledge and Management. 3. Why Individuals and Organizations Have Difficulty in Double-Loop Learning. 4. Creating a Theory of Practice: The Case of Organizational Paradoxes. 5. Today's Problems with Tomorrow's Organizations. 6. Teaching Smart People How to Learn. 7. A Leadership Dilemma: Skilled Incompetence. Part II: Inhibiting Organizational Learning and Effectiveness: 8. Organizational Learning and Management Information Systems. 9. Strategy Implementation: An Experiment in Learning. 10. How Strategy Professionals Deal with Threat: Individual and Organizational. 11. The Dilemma of Implementing Controls: The Case of Managerial Accounting. 12. Human Problems with Budgets. 13. Bridging Economics and Psychology: The Case of the Economics Theory of the Firm. Part III: The Counterproductive Consequences of Organizational Development and Human Resource Activities: 14. Good Communication That Blocks Learning. 15. Reasoning, Action Strategies, and Defensive Routines: The Case of OD Practitioners. 16. Inappropriate Defences Against The Monitoring of Organizational Development Practice. 17. Do Personal Growth Laboratories Represent an Alternative Culture? Part IV: The Inhibition of Valid and Usable Information from the Correct Use of Normal Science: 18. Actionable Knowledge: Design Causality in the Service of Consequential Theory. 19. Field Theory as a Basis for Scholarly Consulting. 20. Unrecognized Defences of Scholars; Impact on Theory and Research. 21. Seeking Truth and Actionable Knowledge: How the Scientific Method Inhibits Both. 22. Problems and New Directions for Industrial Psychology. 23. The Incompleteness of Social-Psychological Theory: Examples from Small Group, Cognitive Consistency, and Attribution Research. 24. Dangers in Applying Results from Experimental Social Psychology. 25. Making Knowledge More Relevant to Practice: Maps for Action. 26. Participatory Action Research and Action Science Compared. 27. Some Unintended Consequences of Rigorous Research. Index.