FROM ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING TO THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION

This article reviews theories of organizational learning and presents a framework with which to organize the literature. We argue that unit of analysis provides one critical distinction in the organizational le arning literature and research objective provides another. The resulti ng two-by-two matrix contains four categories of research, which we ha ve called: (2) residues (organizations as residues of past learning); (2) communities (organizations as collections of individuals who can l earn and develop); (3) participation (organizational improvement gaine d through intelligent activity of individual members), and (4) account ability (organizational improvement gained through developing individu als' mental models). We also propose a distinction between the terms o rganizational learning and the learning organization. Our subsequent a nalysis identifies relationships between disparate parts of the litera ture and shows that these relationships point to individual mental mod els as a critical source of leverage for creating learning organizatio ns. A brief discussion of the work of two of the most visible research ers in this field, Peter Senge and Chris Argyris, provides additional support for this type of change strategy.