Replying to LO26354 --
Malcolm:
In response to your query below, we can be sure that no meaningful change
towards sustainable practice will occur in the absence of social learning.
In other words, organizational learning does not necessarily lead to
positive change, but no positive change can occur without it. This is why
organizational learning is so important to the environmental movement.
Regards,
Mark W. McElroy
Board Chair
The Sustainability Institute
Hartland, VT (www.sustainer.org)
Malcolm Burson wrote:
> As I understand it (I'm only just discovering it), the concept "social
> learning" refers to the process by which relatively large groups who share
> a common political, cultural or social identity choose new individual and
> group actions in response to change. As I am encountering it, it refers
> specifically to the means by which society "learns how to better navigate
> a transition to sustainability" (US National Research Council, "Our Common
> Journey, 1999: 48).
>
> Given the clear linkages between organizational learning and
> global/environmental sustainability issues, I'm wondering what
> connections, as well as differences, you can help me identify between
> organizational learning as we discuss it, and the social learning process
> by which communities and nations endeavor to "make sense of what is
> happening, shape interventions informed by that awareness, and interpret
> the consequences of the interventions against expectations of what might
> otherwise have occured" (ibid., 49).
--"Mark W. McElroy" <mmcelroy@vermontel.net>
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