Dear Colleagues, while we are talking about students and learning, I though
it might be useful to recall what some of the management literature says
about learning, and to think about what this literature suggest our role,
as teachers, should be. Below is an excert taken from:
Boal, K.B., & Hooijberg. 2000. Strategic leadership research: moving on.
Leadership Quarterly Yearly Review of Leadership, 11, 515-550.
Absorptive capacity refers to the ability to learn. It involves the
capacity to recognize new information, assimilate it and apply it towards
new ends. It involves processes used offensively and defensively to
improve fits between the organization and its environments. It is a
continuous genesis of creation and recreation where gestalts and logical
structures are added or deleted from memory (Piaget, 1968). Sometimes these
processes only require adjustments within an existing behavioral
repertoire. Sometimes these processes require modifications of the
interpretative system and development of new combinations of responses.
And, sometimes these processes require the restructuring of the meta-level
system that selects and interprets stimuli within a Weltanschauug that
provides the world view in which the situation is defined (Hedberg, 1981).
Since knowledge and learning are distributed throughout the organization,
absorptive capacity occurs at both the individual and organizational level.
....
Learning occurs through studying, through doing, and through using. These
ways of learning result respectively in changes in know-why, know-how, and
know-what (Garud, 1997). Since everybody wants to learn, but nobody wants
to fail, we suggest that absorptive capacity requires constant
experimentation (Weick, 1965), double loop learning (Argyris & Schön,
1978), and a willingness to tolerate small failures (Sitkin, 1992).
Ghoshal and Bartlett (1994) suggest that a key role of management is to
create an organizational context within which learning can take place.
Collective learning, they suggest, is influenced by distributed initiative
and mutual cooperation, which is built upon the attributes of discipline,
stretch, trust, and support. Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld (1999) suggest
the importance of a context that encourages: Plausible judgment, active
listening, periodic information exchange, and working consensus. (See,
Cohen and Sproul, 1995, for a collection of essays on organizational
learning.)
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Kim Boal
College of Business Administration
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409
(806) 742-2150
KimBoal@ttu.edu