Organizational Learning in Asia: Issues and Challenges

Organizational Learning in Asia: Issues and Challenges addresses important and pressing questions on organizational learning in Asia in both domestic and foreign firms—those that have been forgotten in the mainstream literature or that remain unasked and unanswered.

Three sets of questions are especially salient. First, how can firms operating in, or from, Asia detect, respect, recognize, and honor different cultural stances on suggestion-giving, knowledge sharing, and standardization while also challenging accepted wisdom, avoiding risks and mistakes, and voicing disagreement?

Second, how can such firms facilitate local experimentation and innovation by providing a common knowledge platform in a non-totalitarian manner? Finally, how can such forums promote ‘reverse’ knowledge transfer from subsidiary to headquarters and across subsidiaries in different nations by avoiding ethnocentricity, cultivating local talent, and building a group of 'communities of practice' across cultural and status boundaries?

Addresses important and pressing questions about organizational learning in Asia for both domestic and foreign firmsExplores how such firms can facilitate local experimentation and innovationPromotes ‘reverse’ knowledge transfer from subsidiary, to headquarters, and across subsidiaries in different nations

Part I: Introduction and Background 1. Introduction: Organizational Learning in Context, Not Isolation 2. Organizational Learning in the Context of Institutional Voids: Government Interventionism and Business Networks in Asia

Part II: Learning At Individual And Team Levels 3. Lose it to Gain it! Unlearning by Individuals and Relearning as a Team 4. Knowledge Management Strategies, Imitation, and Innovation: An Empirical Study of Vietnamese Firms

Part III: Learning At Organizational & Inter-Organizational Levels 5. An Entrepreneurial Perspective on Developed Economy Firms’ Learning from Asia 6. How Chinese Exporters Acquire Learning Capability: Empirical Evidence from an Emerging Economy 7. Public–Private Partnerships in Chinese Hospitals and Knowledge Transfer

Part IV: Conclusions 8. A Contextual Perspective on Organizational Learning 9. Conclusion: Challenges for Organizational Learning—Institutional Contexts, Cross-Border Knowledge and Context