What is Old Organizational Learning

The ambition of this chapter is to pay some attention to more obvious, as well as more subtle, methods for organizations to become independent of the individual’s subjective knowledge, from the employees’ point of view. Terms such as ‘knowledge sharing’, ‘knowledge transfer’, and ‘learning for all’ are almost always seen as being positive for both employers and employees. However, this chapter will critically examines those terms. Three popular management ideas relating to knowledge and/or learning have been analysed from a ‘knowledge control’ perspective: knowledge management, organizational learning, and the learning organization. The main conclusion of this conceptual and elaborating chapter is that the more current and less academic ideas of the learning organization and knowledge management contain the same tools as the idea of ‘old’ organizational learning as regards gaining control over knowledge, but that these two ideas additionally contain other knowledge control measures, which are more refined, in the sense that they are less obvious as knowledge control measures. The idea of ‘new’ organizational learning, however, is less suited to knowledge control, since it implies that knowledge is not storable. In other words, the chapter’s contribution is an analysis of some of the most popular management ideas that deal with knowledge and/or learning relating to the organizational/employer independence of subjective knowledge, from the employees’ point of view, something which is rarely seen.