Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to locate the dominant discourse on organizations and their management in the history of Western thought. Such location highlights the fundamental, taken‐for‐granted assumptions underlying the dominant discourse. The purpose is also to identify an...

This paper argues that to talk about organisations learning is to reify and anthropomorphise organisations. Instead of thinking of an organisation as if it were a thing or a person it is closer to experience to think of an organisation as the patterning of peoples' interactions with each other....