Learning as an Activity of Interdependent People

This paper argues that to talk about organisations learning is to reify and anthropomorphise organisations. Instead of thinking of an organisation as if it were a thing or a person it is closer to experience to think of an organisation as the patterning of peoples’ interactions with each other. This paper explores the assumptions that are being made when we talk about organisations or groups that learn, or about individuals learning in groups or organisations. It suggests an alternative to thinking in these ways, namely, that learning is an activity of interdependent people. If one takes the view an organisation is the organising activities of interdependent people, it leads to a particular perspective on learning. Much of the communicative and power relating activities of interdependent people take the form of continually iterated patterns of repetition in which meaning and power figurations have the quality of stability which we call identity. But because of the nonlinear iterative nature of human interaction there is always the potential for small differences to be amplified into transformative shifts in identity. Learning is then understood as the emerging shifts in the patterning of human communicative interaction and power relating. Leaning is the activity of interdependent people and can only be understood in terms of self organising communicative interaction and power relating in which identities are potentially transformed. Individuals cannot learn in isolation and organisations can never learn. Learning, organisation, complexity, process, responsive, emergence. This paper is one of a number in a special issue titled “The Implications of Complexity and Chaos Theories for Organizations that Learn.” That title immediately points to an important question, which one might pose in the following terms: Do organisations learn or is it individuals and groups in organisations who learn? If one thinks that it is individuals and groups inside an organisation that learn then one focuses attention on individual and collective learning processes. If it is thought that it is organisations that learn then attention is focused on what it is about an organisation that makes learning possible. A distinction along these lines is used by Easterby-Smith and Araujo (1999) to identify two strands in the literature to do with organisations and learning. They distinguish between the literature on organisational learning and that on the learning organisation. They say that the former “has concentrated on the detached observation and analysis of the processes involved in individual and collective learning inside organizations” (p2). The literature on the learning organisation, on the other hand, is concerned with “methodological tools which can help to identify, promote and evaluate the quality of