The War of the Woods: Processes of Organizational Learning and Institutional Change

150) Using a partially grounded theory approach, we examine multilevel learning processes over time at four British Columbia forest companies in response to significant changes in their environment. We identify a self-reinforcing ‘legitimacy trap’, where organizations respond with moral indignation and the escalation of normative commitment to an institutionalized practice when they are subjected to normative claims that they judge to be illegitimate. We then identify facilitators of and impediments to high quality adaptive exploratory learning, using the Crossan, Lane and White (1999) framework of organizational learning processes. We build on their framework to include ‘normative confusion’, which leads to unlearning and paves the way for future learning. We also examine processes of institutionalization at the field level, in addition to the processes of intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing at the levels of individual, group and organization. We formalize our findings in propositions and offer suggestions for future research and practice.