Organizational Learning

Abstract

The professional commitment of practitioners in a changing society requires them to continuously acquire new professional knowledge. Since robust and relevant knowledge is often in short supply, practitioners must learn to acquire the knowledge they need. Similarly, social agencies must become institutions that support the development of practice innovations by engaging in organizational learning. This implies that they both adopt an organizational culture and create structural arrangements conducive to learning. Given this imperative, the following entry reviews the philosophical, conceptual, and methodological underpinnings of organizational learning as a strategy for guiding practitioners and organizations in a systematic endeavor to invent and manage knowledge. A methodology for the application of organizational learning in social services is presented.