The Politics of Organizational Learning: Integrating Power into the 4I Framework

Abstract

We argue that power and politics provide the social energy that transforms the insights of individuals and groups into the institutions of an organization. Moreover, we propose that different forms of power in organizations are connected to specific learning processes—intuition is linked with discipline, interpretation with influence, integration with force, and institutionalization with domination—and that an examination of these different forms of power provides a basis for understanding why some insights become institutionalized while others do not.