Paths of Managerial Learning in the East German Context

Abstract

In the debate about organizational or managerial learning the connection between individual and organizational levels is often not clearly visible, but there seems to be a consensus that organizational slack is both a main condition for and a result of organizational learning. In the process of learning, manage ment produces or reduces organizational slack. This paper empirically exam ines how managerial learning creates or reduces organizational slack. Such learning is a dialectical process in which the social practices of management are stabilized and/or changed and embedded in special institutional settings. By means of three different case studies it will be demonstrated that the pro cesses of organizational learning, both simple and complex, are tied to spe cifically institutional conditions. The conventional debate about organizational or managerial learning seems to explain only a specific part of these learning processes. In the managerial liter ature the often used metaphor of 'the learning organization' describes learning as a self-centred process, in which the organization and its actors are separated from their institutional context and social embeddedness. The research pre sented in this paper demonstrates that it is also necessary to take into considera tion the learning landscape of an organization. In this way, the internal and external embeddedness of managerial learning are stressed. The creation and use of organizational slack by management — as a main condition for, and product of learning — seem to be directly linked to their abilities to organize the processes themselves and to experiment with established routines without the restrictions of external administrative orders or imaginary market incentives.