Organisational Learning and Public Sector Management: An Alternative View

Abstract

The public service modernization agenda has directed attention to the problematic questions of how public sector organisations learn, what they learn, and how they fail to learn. This article considers: definitional problems of organisational learning; the critical differences between individual and organisational learning; the public organisation's capacity to learn; some of the principal sources of public sector learning; the ambivalent nature of learning networks; and the main barriers to effective learning. Drawing from a current study amongst senior public service managers, the discussion assesses the extent to which public service modernization encourages, or rather inhibits, organisational change and improvement. It is suggested that organisational learning in the public sector is not necessarily delivered through partnerships and the agenda of modernization: it may derive instead from internal processes and a focus upon the existing strengths of the organisation. The article re-evaluates the conventional wisdom of organisational learning and proposes a heretical view of learning and networks. In drawing out prospects for future research, it advocates a renewed emphasis upon effective internal learning.

Re-examining the deployment of market orientation in the public leisure sector

“…Therefore, excess information generation coupled with processing constraints may be resulting in public leisure managers limiting their responses to the issues they have the most experience with and not necessarily those most significant to service delivery (e.g., Souchon et al, 2004;Vyas & Souchon, 2003). Specifically, leisure managers' decisionmaking may draw on their historical knowledge base of community needs (Fenwick & McMillan, 2005). We suggest that leisure managers rely on this in decision-making above wanton information generation and dissemination, which would only serve to slowdown the decision-making process further.…”

Conceptualizing innovation management development through organizational learning in the public service: any lessons for developing states?

“…Single-loop learning denotes the correction of errors and modification of action in pursuit of known existing goals. Double-loop learning means that the learning process itself turned back on goals and assumptions with the possible outcome of organizational transformation (Fenwick and McMillan, 2005). In their efforts to promote organizational learning, many public sectors have applied two approaches: the learning loop model of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, and the learning organization model of Peter Senge.…”

“…The Economic Commission of Africa (2010) believes that the development of organizational learning is a continuous innovation management, which has to be a top agenda of all public organizations in order to become high performance organizations. Fenwick and Mcmillan (2005) opine that organizational learning is based on the notion of experience, whether individual or collective, although this does raise a difficult issue of whether an organization (in contrast to an individual) can be said to 'experience' something in any intelligible sense. A second assumption is that organizational learning produces change.…”

“…Private sector experience, overseas examples, personal contacts or local networks are all possible sources of learning (Fenwick and Mcmillan, 2005). The private sector was initially held up as the model for the public service to emulate, "seen as a panacea" at the time (as in the era of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT)) (Fenwick and Mcmillan, 2005). However, as pointed out in Fenwick and Mcmillan, things have "moved on" and the private sector is no longer the only model on offer.…”

Applying the Lessons Learnt

“…I outlined above that regeneration managers are working in exclusionary structures of legitimacy that have been largely imposed by central government and that these are stifling community involvement and individual learning. Furthermore, regeneration managers are constantly engaged in systems of performance management and evaluation, which may allow for lessons to be learned as they will force reflection (given that evidence must be gathered and performance leagues are often published) (Fenwick & McMillan 2005), but can they bring about change when so many of the targets are centrally set?…”