Organizations: Frameworks or frame work?

This article presents a methodological suggestion for organizational learning and learning about organizations. “Framework” is employed as a fruitful organizational metaphor for the purpose of understanding and keeping in touch with change processes in the organization. The existence of change processes is seen to be a fundamental characteristic of organizations as social phenomenon. Organizations as framework are accordingly seen to be continously created and recreated by actors goverened by their cognitive frames. These frames and frameworks serve the contradictory function of both preconditioning creative activity as well as stabilizing and straightening — framing — human activity. The on-going change processes tend to take place “behind the back” of the organizational partipicipants due to the implicit nature of their frames, and the character of that change tends to remain within the basic prevailing assumptions of the focal organization. The ability to get in touch with these dialectics, also a prerequisite for the ability to manage organizational change processes, can therefore be seen to be dependent upon an ability to elicit and reflect upon the frames that the organizational participants make use of. A “frameworkshop” is proposed as one possible tool for frame work to help the participants of an organization explore the logic of their organizational life.