Organisational Learning and Governance Through Embedded Practices

This article has two principal aims. The first is to reconcile thecompetence based approach to the firm with traditional contractualapproaches, instead of treating them as incompatible. The mainthesis advanced is that firms manage simultaneously competencesand transactions, but they do so in accordance with a specificlexicographic order of priorities. The second aim is to explorein detail the sources of knowledge formation in the firm. Theanalysis privileges anthropological readings which stress the roleof learning – both radical and incremental – within distributed communities of practice. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000