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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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'...