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Introduction
Several countries experience a strongly aging population, so that assuring intergenerational knowledge transfer (IKT) represents an important challenge for organizations (Leibold and Voelpel, 2007). As knowledge transfer is part of the organizational learning (OL) process (Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2011), IKT also plays an important role for OL. It differs from knowledge transfer per se , because it leads to the interaction of generations with different characteristics, knowledge types and learning habits (Gerpott et al. , 2017) which can lead to different types of relations (Joshi et al. , 2011). In spite of important advancements in recent literature, current research lacks a deep understanding of the variety of IKT. In fact, organizations have recently become aware of their needs to identify and create further intergenerational knowledge-building opportunities (Gerpott et al. , 2017).
Literature distinguishes between unidirectional or bidirectional (mutual) IKT. While the unidirectional approach is dominant, the bidirectional perspective which considers tacit and explicit knowledge has only received further attention in recent research (Burmeister and Deller, 2016).
Especially, the creation and sharing of tacit knowledge which is key to OL (Lam, 2000) is highly context-related and locally situated (Suchman, 1987), so that comparing different contexts can help to provide further insights. In fact, several international comparative studies have shown that human resource management (HRM) (Cooke et al. , 2017), knowledge management (KM) (Lam, 2000) or even IKT practices (Lyons et al. , 2014) tend to differ from one country to another.
In line with previous comparative work, the research objective here is to develop a better understanding of IKT practices, involving both tacit and explicit knowledge. An international comparison based on an institutional framework (Amable, 2003) takes into consideration the situated character of IKT practices. This qualitative research involves eight aeronautic and pharmaceutic organizations in Germany and Quebec. Both regions have been chosen as national contexts facing important demographic challenges but with different institutional environments (Amable, 2003).
Theoretical framework
Our interest here is to study IKT to enrichen the social perspective on OL which focuses on how people "make sense of their experiences at work" (Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2011). IKT can be conceived from a technical or human perspective, the former apprehending it as rather unidirectional and the latter suggesting bidirectional and mutual IKT (Burmeister...