Distributed Cognition and the Theory of the Firm : Enriching Nelson and Winter’s Evolutionary Analysis of Organisational Learning and Memory

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to re-examine the analysis of organisational learning and memory advanced by the evolutionary analysis of the firm associated with Nelson and Winter (1982). Rather than focus on the debate about codification of knowledge, we propose to pay more attention to the way knowledge is distributed, not only among individuals, but also between individuals and their socio-material environment. We present a distributed cognition approach that offers an understanding of learning as a permanent reorganisation process of representational media that are inside as well as outside the individuals involved. We show how this perspective is different from Simon’s conception of cognition considered as information processing. Moreover, this approach renews the tacit knowledge tradition by examining more precisely the links between perception, memory and representation. It also opens new fields of empirical observations.