In spite of a broad agreement among researchers in organizational theory on the importance of rules for the functioning of organizations, most theories of OL neglect or tend to underestimate the role of organizational rules in processes of OL. However, there is one important exception: James G....

We report results of a study on processes of Organizational Learning (OL). Changes and suspensions of organizational rules are taken as indicators for OL. The empiric analysis is performed with personnel rules of a German bank. The aim of our study is to identify factors that have an impact on...

In this paper we argue that incremental organizational change, that we conceptualize predominantly as rule change, has been severely neglected in research on organizational change. A longitudinal study of rule changes in a German bank produced among others the following results: (1) The...

The literature on organizational change very often tells about two specific effects on a organization‘s propensity to change: The positive effect of prior changes and the negative effect of time elapsed since last change. However, these effects might be caused by unobserved heterogeneity as...

Quality management has become a prominent issue in management practice. In general the management literature presents management knowledge, such as quality management techniques and practices, as a technical tool and as a vehicle for improving the efficiency of organizations. The implicit...

According to Neo-Instituionalists the formal structure of organizations is often less a means of coordinating and controlling the relationship between organization and environment, and of coordinating and controlling work-activities. Rather the elements of the formal structure are manifestations...

The central thesis of this paper is that management science, consultancy, and manage-ment practice are social systems, that are on the one hand, dependent on each other, but that, on the other hand, pursue different goals, are subjected to different norms, and therefore develop their own...

This paper deals with organizational rules as storages for organizational knowledge and media for organizational learning. The discussion starts with a revisiting of the first rule based theory of organizational learning, the Behavioral Theory of the Firm, that was developed by Richard Cyert and...

We analyze organizational learning that is based on formal organizational rules. Organizational rules contain problem-solving procedures. Their usefulness as media of organizational learning is, however, dependent on certain properties of the rule system and on the organizational members'...