• PDF / 118,846 Bytes
• 3 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
• 71 Downloads / 256 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT

---

RETROSPECTIVE

Learning in context: Grateful reflections on reflections Daniel A. Levinthal Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3209 Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, 3620 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

Journal of International Business Studies (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267-020-00368-0

I am grateful to the Academy of International Business not only for the recognition as the John Fayerweather Eminent Scholar Award, but also for soliciting three thoughtful reflections on my work by a set of distinguished scholars. One hopes to capture some insight in one’s work and to have others see value in these contributions is quite gratifying. These three essays build a bridge between my largely theoretical contributions to the challenges of multinational management. Imprinted perhaps as a ‘‘child’’ of Silicon Valley1 my empirical reference point has tended to be issues of technological innovation and change. However, upon receiving this award from AIB and reflecting on my work and these essays, arguably multinational management is the ‘‘killer app’’ for these ideas. Much of my work contextualizes processes of organizational learning. While one can study learning in the decontextualized task environment of a Skinner box, much of what is important and interesting about learning processes is its contextualization. Who are the actors that are doing the learning? How does this learning related to the broader array of actions in which the organization is engaged? What is the locus of learning within the organization and what is the time-scale by which actions and outcomes are linked? Honoring context, and how context should inform our understanding of firm behavior, both as academics and practitioners is a hallmark of international business research. What is it about transcending geopolitical borders that should inform our understanding? Often strategy theorists act as if we deal with universal (or at least global) truths. But our patchwork of institutions, location and domain-specific knowledge communities and practices have enormous impact on the nature of processes of learning and adaptation. My first work, Levinthal and March (1981), considered the ecology of learning. Organizations are not only learning about what actions are preferred, they are developing competence at the actions that they choose. This dual learning leads to the potential pathology of competency traps: the organization becomes highly effective at less than optimal actions. More generally, Jim March and I argued that learning tends to be myopic (Levinthal & March, 1993). Outcomes that are more proximate, both in time and ‘‘space’’, will tend to constitute the feedback that informs the assessment of the associated actions. ‘‘Space’’ may, as we emphasized, be thought of as diverse functional units within the organization. Clearly for the AIB community ‘‘space’’ tends to be defined geographically. Local learning, linking site specific actions

Learning in context: Grateful reflections on reflections

to site specific outcomes, has a certain p