Senge's Learning Organization: Democratic Transformation or Neoliberal Practice? Identifying the Contradictions and Conflicts
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Date
2008-04
Authors
Mallory, Krista
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Abstract
Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline" offers hope for the democratic
transformation of modern corporations into learning organizations. This vision sees
corporations as true citizens of the world, deeply aware of the effects of their decisions
on their members, communities, and society at large. Senge acknowledges that existing
structures stand in direct opposition to the principles of the learning organization and
provides a theoretical framework to enable the required transformation, but does not
adequately deal with them in practice.
This thesis explores the power structures of the traditional corporation in order to
identify the contradictions between the democratic principles of the learning
organization and the neoliberal practices of the corporation. This demonstrates how the
learning organization discourse is ultimately being interpreted and used to increase
productivity from workers to the continued exclusive benefit of the professional
managerial class, the de facto rulers of the modern corporation.
Through the Foucauldian lens of governmentality, the power relations in large,
publicly-traded corporations are laid bare, thereby showing where the true power is held
in the organization. This provides an analysis of who will control how the learning
organization is practiced in this context.
Finally, you will be provided with a precise explanation of the structural reasons
that the implementation of the learning organization's democratic ideals can and do fail
in modern corporations. Ultimately, the failure of Senge's "Fifth Discipline" to deal
with these structural barriers leads to the learning organization being used as a
management tool rather than as a fundamentally transformative practice that
encompasses democratic reform.
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Keywords
Intellectual capital , Organizational effectiveness , Organizational learning