CONSTRUCTING THE UNDERSTANDING OF LEARNING ORGANIZATION

Drawing on material from a case study in a Swedish public authority he paper discusses an attemt at turning the authority into a learning organization and particularly how people in the organization construct their understanding of learning organization. Using a phenomenological approach and theories on sensemaking the paper shows that prior experience as well as experience from early substantial applications have a strong impact on the individual understanding compared with conceptual information. It can also be seen that people integrate facts, values and emotions in their creation of understanding. The implications of this for management are analyzed and discussed