Learning Organizations

The purposes of this paper are to develop a comprehensive understanding of how ‘learning organizations’ can be created and to provide a partial evaluation of the literature with a view to developing propositions for the future research agenda. To these ends, the paper analyzes the components of ‘learning organizations,’ deals with the barriers to organizational learning and several strategies for coping with them, draws upon the works of Morgan—single-loop learning and double-loop learning, of Flood and Romm—triple-loop learning, handles the work of Senge—a case of systems thinking, and then evaluates the ideas of main contributors of chaos and complexity theory from the managerial standpoint. In light of these intellectual constructs, the paper proposes a framework for managers in which the essential properties of complex systems that are capable of learning are set out. The paper also provides new propositions for future research. JEL Classification Codes: D29.