A Tale of Two Genres?: Knowledge Management in Organizations

This paper suggests that organizational learning phenomena belong to fundamentally two different types: the relatively deterministic industrial genre and the idiosyncratic behavioral genre. These genres differ substantially from each other on key dimensions such as the nature of embedding of learning, cumulativeness of learning, learning orientation and criteria used to evaluate outcomes. Researchers investigating organizational learning phenomena need to be sensitive to these differences to be able to effectively distinguish patterns that would otherwise be masked by variations attributable to the genres.