STRUCTURAL CHANGE AND LEARNING WITHIN ORGANIZATIONS

Conventional wisdom often tells us that when it comes to " getting things done " it is " who " you know rather than " what " you know that matters. Contrarily, this same wisdom advises that " knowledge is power ". The conflict between these perspectives is reflected in research that separates these two factors, focusing on how structure influences behavior devoid of personal attributes, or on attributes excluding the relationships that contextualize the individual and their attributes. This research has shaped our thinking about behaviors in organizations, often focusing on either the relationship or the attribute unable to reconcile the interrelationship between these two factors. Today, however, a new view of organizations as inherently complex, computational and adaptive systems is emerging. This new perspective urges a reconsideration of the roles of relations and attributes. These two mechanisms are symbiotic, simultaneously impacting the behavior in organizations. Organizations are composed of intelligent adaptive agents constrained and enabled by their positions in networks linking agents and knowledge. Consequently, organizations are themselves synthetic agents in which knowledge and learning reside in the minds of the participant agents and in the connections among them. This paper presents a knowledge level approach to organizational learning. This approach defines learning, culture, structure and behavior at the individual and organizational level in terms of both " who one knows " and " what one knows ". Relationships among individuals are important as they facilitate individual access to knowledge and serve as a form of organizational knowledge. Learning is conceptualized as the acquisition or loss of nodes and relationships, as with each node or relationship gained or lost knowledge is likewise acquired or forgotten. This is true whether the nodes are pieces of information or agents. This is true whether the relationships are among individuals, among information, or between individuals and information. Thus learning and memory exist at the individual and organizational level. When organizations, as synthetic agents learn important organizational behaviors emerge. Such behaviors reflect the emergent structuration of the organization's culture and structure through learning at the individual and structural level. Herein, this view is explicated and given precise form by defining the primary constructs in terms of the meta-network linking people and knowledge and the processes for evoking change in this meta-network. Essentially a knowledge level perspective is used to extend the traditional approach to social networks to include both people and ideas. Social …