This paper considers the relation between the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties in organizational learning. It examines some complications in allocating resources between the two, particularly those introduced by the distribution of costs and benefits across time and space, and the effects of ecological interaction. Two general situations involving the development and use of knowledge in organizations are modeled. The first is the case of mutual learning between members of an organization and an organizational code. The second is the case of learning and competitive advantage in competition for primacy. The paper develops an argument that adaptive processes, by refining exploitation more rapidly than exploration, are likely to become effective in the short run but self-destructive in the long run. The possibility that certain common organizational practices ameliorate that tendency is assessed.

Organizational learning has many virtues, virtues which recent writings in strategic management have highlighted. Learning processes, however, are subject to some important limitations. As is well‐known, learning has to cope with confusing experience and the complicated problem of balancing the competing goals of developing new knowledge (i.e., exploring) and exploiting current competencies in the face of dynamic tendencies to emphasize one or the other. We examine the ways organizations approach these problems through simplification and specialization and how those approaches contribute to three forms of learning myopia, the tendency to overlook distant times, distant places, and failures, and we identify some ways in which organizations sustain exploration in the face of a tendency to overinvest in exploitation. We conclude that the imperfections of learning are not so great as to require abandoning attempts to improve the learning capabilities of organizations, but that those imperfections suggest a certain conservatism in expectations.

This paper reviews the literature on organizational learning. Organizational learning is viewed as routine-based, history-dependent, and target-oriented. Organizations are seen as learning by encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behavior. Within this perspective on organizational learning, topics covered include how organizations learn from direct experience, how organizations learn from the experience of others, and how organizations develop conceptual frameworks or paradigms for interpreting that experience. The section on organizational memory discusses how organizations encode, store, and retrieve the lessons of history despite the turnover of personnel and the passage of time. Organizational learning is further complicated by the ecological structure of the simultaneously adapting behavior of other organizations, and by an endogenously changing environment. The final section discusses the limitations as well as the possibilities of organizational learning as a form of intelligence.

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This paper explores the relation between decision theoretic conceptions of risk and the conceptions held by executives. It considers recent studies of risk attitudes and behavior among managers against the background of conceptions of risk derived from theories of choice. We conclude that managers take risks and exhibit risk preferences, but the processes that generate those observables are somewhat removed from the classical processes of choosing from among alternative actions in terms of the mean (expected value) and variance (risk) of the probability distributions over possible outcomes. We identify three major ways in which the conceptions of risk and risk taking held by these managers lead to orientations to risk that are different from what might be expected from a decision theory perspective: Managers are quite insensitive to estimates of the probabilities of possible outcomes; their decisions are particularly affected by the way their attention is focused on critical performance targets; and they make a sharp distinction between taking risks and gambling. These differences, along with closely related observations drawn from other studies of individual and organizational choice, indicate that the behavioral phenomenon of risk taking in organizational settings will be imperfectly understood within a classical conception of risk.decision making, risk, management

Contemporary theories of politics tend to portray politics as a reflection of society, political phenomena as the aggregate consequences of individual behavior, action as the result of choices based on calculated self-interest, history as efficient in reaching unique and appropriate outcomes, and decision making and the allocation of resources as the central foci of political life. Some recent theoretical thought in political science, however, blends elements of these theoretical styles into an older concern with institutions. This new institutionalism emphasizes the relative autonomy of political institutions, possibilities for inefficiency in history, and the importance of symbolic action to an understanding of politics. Such ideas have a reasonable empirical basis, but they are not characterized by powerful theoretical forms. Some directions for theoretical research may, however, be identified in institutionalist conceptions of political order.

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