It is received wisdom that organizations need to adapt to changing environments. Many scholars of adaptation traditionally focus on revolutionary change in organizations. In contrast, this study shows that incremental change is a neglected yet essential part of adaptive processes in...

Organizational rules (standard operating procedures) are, at the same time, enabling and restraining. They are enabling, because, e.g., they represent highly effective coordination instruments and serve as stores of organizational knowledge. On the other hand, they tend to develop a dynamics...

Processes of rule change and organizational Learning Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are part of the decision environment that organizations constitute for their members: they limit the aspect of reality which is relevant for certain decision problems. At the same time, SOPs might be...

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...