Category Archives: Organizational Health & Safety

A Study about Power, Control and Organisational Learning

Abstract:~ A case study of a bank illustrates that organisational learning can be based on a structured social construction of cognitive homogeneity which generates an increase of control and enhances power of the management by reinforcing the legitimacy of decisions. However, this case study also shows that learning and non-learning are the two faces of the same process or, in other words, that organisational learning can produce unawareness and unintentional nonlearning by too much cultural uniformity.

Introduction:~ The aim of this paper is to provide a critical examination of underlying processes involved in applications of organisational learning theory, i.e. some interventionists’ conception of the learning organisation. It presents a three-fold sociological analysis. In the first part, managerial organisation theory and consultants’ writings within the interpretative perspective of organisational learning processes will be reviewed and analysed. Then a theoretical framework based on concepts such as power, domination and control will be proposed. In a third part, empirical work will be reviewed, in order to illustrate the processes by which some unanticipated and unwelcome consequences of the very act of building a learning organisation can appear in the long run. Read more on Organisational Learning