Skip to content

Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective

Why this mattered

Argyris and Schön’s theory shifted organizational learning from a loose metaphor about firms “adapting” to a diagnosable process of inquiry: organizations learn when people detect and correct errors in the rules, routines, norms, and “theories-in-use” that guide action. Its key move was distinguishing single-loop learning, which fixes errors without changing governing assumptions, from double-loop learning, which questions those assumptions themselves. That made organizational learning analyzable as a problem of action, accountability, and institutionalized reasoning, not merely training, information transfer, or managerial culture.

What became newly possible was a practical vocabulary for studying why competent organizations repeatedly fail to learn. The paper’s theory of action perspective explained how organizations can publicly endorse openness, inquiry, and evidence while privately reproducing defensive routines that block feedback. This helped turn failures of learning into observable patterns: gaps between espoused theory and theory-in-use, error correction that preserves the status quo, and interventions aimed at changing the conditions under which people reason together.

Its influence runs through later work on the “learning organization,” organizational knowledge creation, psychological safety, dynamic capabilities, and institutional learning. Those later literatures often moved beyond Argyris and Schön’s interventionist action-science frame, but they inherited the central paradigm shift: durable organizational improvement depends not only on acquiring knowledge, but on changing the governing assumptions and social routines that determine what the organization is able to notice, discuss, and revise.

Abstract

Ch. Argyris, D. A. Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective, Reis: Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, No. 77/78, Monográfico sobre la Formación y las Organizaciones (Jan. - Jun., 1997), pp. 345-348

Sources