Organizations Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning

This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of practice-based organizational learning and knowing.

• Based on the author's detailed study of safety practices in different corporate settings.
• The author uses this study to empirically describe how learning, knowing and organizing are practised.
• Centred on the concepts of "knowing in practice" and the "texture" of organizational knowledge.
• Gives a rich account of how organizations learn and how corporate practices and policies evolve.

Why has the issue of learning and knowledge in organizations been the subject of such lively debate over the last 20 years? This book furnishes an answer to this question, supported with arguments, and founded on data and examples from empirical research.

The author uses her detailed study of safety practices in different corporate settings to ground her theories of organizational learning. She shows how safety can be interpreted as an organizational practice and, using this example, she empirically describes how learning, knowing and organizing are practised. Her account centres on the transformative concepts of “knowing in practice” and the "texture" of organizational learning.

This book gives readers a rich account or how organizations learn and how corporate practices and policies evolve, and in this way makes an important contribution to our understanding of organizational knowledge.

Silvia Gherardi is Professor of Organization and Management at the University of Trento, Italy.