Organisational learning: Collective mind or cognitivist metaphor?

The concept of organisational learning may be seen to be based on an implicit cognitive model of organisations. An examination of the literature on the subject, however, reveals that there are widely differing views on how this model is to be interpreted. Does it really mean that organisations are entities capable of cognition, or is it just a metaphor? In this paper some of the main perspectives on organisational learning are explored and their assumptions about the nature of the phenomenon are discussed. The implications of the different perspectives for the relationship between information systems and organisational learning are considered.