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Many people still ask “what is a learning organization, what does the concept mean?” This is entirely understandable. The learning organization – or for that matter organizational learning – is a concept (or phenomenon) that is not easily defined. Questions such as “are there any true learning organizations?” and “are there any organizations that are not learning?” arise. These questions are fair, and so, it is also fair that I, as Editor-in-Chief of The Learning Organization, the journal that publishes research on the learning organization and organizational learning, try to give an idea of how these questions may be answered, or at least offer my perspective on these issues. First, though, I will give a historical background to the term “learning organization”.
The “learning organization” term in a historical perspective
The term learning organization was coined by Senge (1990) in his best-selling book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Senge, 1990). Senge’s name has since then been almost synonymous with the idea of learning organization, and he is often considered to be the guru of the learning organization (Jackson, 2001), even if he by no means was the first author to use “learning organization” in the title of a publication (this was done by, e.g., Garratt, 1987; Hayes et al., 1988).
As I have elaborated on more extensively elsewhere (Örtenblad, 2007), the term “learning organization” as used today could be assumed to be the result of two different developmental processes. In one of these, the word order “learning organization” was used for “organized learning”, that is, the organization of certain learning activities. This way of using the term appeared especially in the areas of pedagogy and educational science (Hofstetter, 1967) and also in the area of management and organization studies (Kolb et al., 1971; Megginson and Pedler, 1976, p. 264; Huczynski and Boddy, 1979).
The other developmental process for the term “learning organization” was a transformation of the term “organizational learning”, in terms of a paraphrasing of the latter term to the former word order – a learning organization was simply an organization where learning is taking place. As early as the late 1970s and early 1980s, this paraphrasing occurred in works that are known to be...