The power of institutional roots

The roots of this story date back to 1969, when the WZB was founded as an independent research center outside the university system by members of parliament in the Federal Republic of Germany. The WZB was charged with conducting a type of research that did not exist in the German university context at the time, namely large-scale, empirical projects with international reach that contributed to theory development while also being oriented to the problems in society.

It was a particular historical constellation that gave birth to the WZB. Political decision makers were looking for ways to strengthen the beleaguered city of West Berlin, cut off from its hinterland, surrounded by communist East Germany, and deprived of resources that would guarantee its survival from within. Public funds could be mobilized for this purpose. During the 1960s experts, opinion makers, and politicians expected much from the social scientists and from what they might contribute to the improvements of public life, democratic reform, and the progress of human affairs. In Western Europe, people looked to the United States, which seemed to have a lead in bringing professional expertise and public life together in new and productive ways. At the same time, many universities were in turmoil and challenged by protest movements. This was certainly the case in Berlin and particularly for the social science departments. In this constellation, the initiative for creating a powerful science center outside the universities with emphasis on the social sciences came from a small group of concerned citizens and professional politicians with different party affiliations. They succeeded in mobilizing the necessary political support. Since 1976 the institutional budget of the WZB has been composed of contributions from the Federal Republic of Germany (75% ) and the city state of West Berlin (25% ). Additional project funding has been obtained from foundations, ministries, and other sources (Janshen, 1979; WZB, 1994). In recent years, the annual budget of the WZB amounted to 15–17 million euro.

The first institute to be established in 1970 was the International Institute of Management (IIM), under the directorship of James D. Howell (Stanford University) and later of Walter Goldberg (University of Göteborg) and Fritz Scharpf (University of Konstanz), with scholars like Bo Hedberg from Sweden, Bill Starbuck from the United States, and Bernhard Wilpert from Germany. The groundbreaking work they conducted still has a significant impact on the field of organization studies today, including Hedberg's (1981) concept of 'unlearning,' which remains a central element of organizational learning theory.

Additional institutes were established alongside the IIM in 1975 and 1976: the International Institute of Comparative Social Studies (directed by Karl W. Deutsch and Frieder Naschold) and the International Institute for Environment and Society (directed by Meinolf Dierkes). The founders of the WZB recognized that a programmatic approach was needed with a medium-to-long-term orientation in order to conduct innovative research capable of generating sound knowledge of value to the academic community as well as to decision makers in society. The directors of the institutes were responsible for developing 5-year research programs for which they recruited scholars from diverse disciplines and countries. The members of the institutes designed large projects to achieve the agreed program, and successfully applied for grants from funding bodies in Germany and abroad.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the WZB was basically a loose confederation of three large institutes at different locations in the city with a very small and weak central structure. These institutes were mostly led by young directors in their 30s and 40s (from the fields of political science, sociology, and economics) who were keen to experiment with unconventional types of research in which comparative approaches, interdisciplinarity, and practical problem orientation played a large role. They did influential research on what is now called governance, on research and technology as factors of societal change, on work relations and unions, health risks and preventive forms of social policy, as well as on system analysis, computer-based predictability of global developments, and environmental problems. The WZB was committed to generating socially relevant knowledge. Most of its directors and many senior fellows drew on their research findings to provide advice to policy makers in government, business, and unions, in Germany and abroad.

In the mid-1980s, the WZB was profoundly restructured. This was partly due to incentives and pressures coming from the political sphere (in the early 1980s governments with a slightly more conservative leaning had taken over both in the Federal Republic and in the city state of Berlin), partly due to initiatives of the academics themselves, some of whom preferred more distance vis-à-vis political debates and requested different forms of specialization. At this time the WZB explicitly formulated the overarching guiding theme for its work, namely 'developmental trends, problems of adaptation, and possibilities for innovation in modern democratic societies.' It changed certain elements of its management and structure. It introduced the post of president to increase the institution's ability to renew its agenda and coordinate its resources. The first president was Meinolf Dierkes (1980–1987), followed by Wolfgang Zapf (1987–1994) and then Friedhelm Neidhardt (1994–2000). The institution's structure changed in the 1980s from a loose federation of three relatively independent and large institutes into a more coherent structure of 8–11 smaller research units, which were still rather autonomous and geographically dispersed across West Berlin. The potential for greater cooperation among the units was significantly increased in 1988, when the WZB finally moved into its new home in a campus-like setting designed by James Stirling and located in the Kulturforum, next to the New National Gallery, the State Library, and the Philharmonie.¹ The location gained in significance just a year later when the Berlin Wall fell. Potsdamer Platz was reconstructed, positioning the Kulturforum at the heart of reunified Berlin.

Another lesson that the WZB learned after a few years was that, in order to keep attracting leading scholars, it would have to offer some permanent contracts to directors and senior fellows. At the outset the idea had been that scholars who had worked at the WZB gathering experience in conducting large, international, multi-disciplinary projects, would reenter the German universities, thereby instigating change in the type of research conducted there as well. Contractual conditions at the universities, however, made such leaves of absence difficult, and professors were hesitant to give up their tenure to come to the WZB for only 5 years. The WZB therefore offered tenure to the directors of its research units and joint appointments with one of the Berlin universities. This helped to make WZB positions more attractive, and to strengthen WZB's cooperation with the universities, which previously had been critical of this new research establishment outside their borders. But it also contributed to making the WZB a bit less flexible, more 'normal,' and perhaps more German. Furthermore, the WZB recognized that it needed to secure the tenure of some senior fellows (below the directors' level) in order to develop and conduct large projects that required not only research experience but also networks in academia, policy-making, and target organizations for empirical studies. Still, the new staffing policy restricted tenure to a small percentage of researchers. With respect to the majority of positions, the strategy was maintained of stimulating turnover and enabling the recruitment of scholars with different backgrounds and perspectives for changing programs and projects.

The programmatic orientation of research at the WZB was maintained as an institutional cornerstone, differentiating the WZB from institutes conducting commissioned research as well as from university-based research (Wittrock, 1994). Problem orientation, interdisciplinarity, and comparison continued as trademarks of the WZB. Thematic renewal was ensured through an active search for promising research areas requiring the kind of attention the charter of the WZB prepared it to undertake. These areas were then developed by directors recruited to join the institution specifically for the topic or by current directors and members of their teams who had fulfilled their original agenda and reoriented their attention to emerging issues.

Some of the programs of the 1970s were renewed with different areas of emphasis, for example, 'Regulation of Work' (Frieder Naschold) or 'Labour Market Policy and Employment' (Günther Schmid). The relationship between technological, organizational, and cultural change continued to be a major area of interest combining research on environmental policy, business and society and technological assessment (Meinolf Dierkes and Hedwig Rudolph). The interconnection between economic and social science approaches continued to be one of the strengths of the WZB, now practiced by newly recruited broad-minded economists like Horst Albach, David B. Audretsch, and David Soskice. The latter's important work on 'Varieties of Capitalism' increased the WZB's international visibility, particularly in Western Europe and North America. Friedhelm Neidhardt opened up a new area of WZB research dedicated to exploring the structures of public space and social movements. There was a tendency to concentrate on internal developments of modern Western societies with an emphasis on Germany. But in principle, the comparative thrust, the broad scope, and the large-scale format of research at the WZB were maintained due to its institutional features:

• the charter of the WZB to conduct empirical research that is both theory driven and problem oriented, in an international context, and drawing on multiple disciplinary perspectives;
• the programmatic nature of the research units, which provide a medium-to-long-term horizon for generating knowledge from the results of several large projects;
• the staffing policy, which permits the combination of stability and flexibility needed for innovative research, and which provides the continuity required for building the networks in the academic community and among practitioners that are essential for conducting large, multinational, empirical projects.

Organizational learning in diverse contexts: a case in point

A research center with as broad a mission and as diverse a disciplinary mix as the WZB conducts its research with different methodologies, so there is no 'typical WZB project.' We have selected a specific case that illustrates how the WZB fulfills its mandate to conduct problem-oriented basic research in cooperation with other organizations, its ability to undertake risky research in an international context, and its vitality in committing itself to projects that have a clear mission and a finite life. We present the story of the creation, the implementation, and the results of a complex research project, which, under the leadership of Meinolf Dierkes, dealt with organizational learning in China, Israel, and Germany.

Key concepts of organizational learning had been introduced in the 1970s² but it took a long time for empirical research to be started. Most publications about organizational learning came from the United States, and were either theoretical in nature or based on anecdotal evidence from consulting assignments. No research had been conducted on the topic in Germany at all. The WZB's decision to undertake a major empirical study on organizational learning was therefore in itself unusual in the early 1990s. So was the idea of tackling the task by drawing on countries as diverse as China, Israel, and Germany.

At the WZB, however, the idea of designing a multi-country study to generate theoretically sound knowledge appeared eminently logical. The organizational charter emphasized large international, innovative projects, and members of the research unit 'Organization and Technology' had the necessary experience with this kind of research, as well as an international network of contacts to draw on. Research conducted in very different contexts, as advised by Przeworski and Teune (1971), offered the possibility of revealing robust generalizable conclusions. The choice of Germany was obvious, given WZB's location and its contacts in the business community that would open access for empirical work. But why China and Israel – and how? The few Western researchers who had studied China by the early 1990s were regional specialists rather than social scientists interested in developing theory. The unit was able to conceive of and conduct such a multi-country study because of the international network of relationships it had built, including the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Center for Technological Analysis and Forecasting of Tel Aviv University. Like the WZB, these organizations had contacts in companies on which to base such a field study. The researchers from these partners, however, had no expertise in the research field of organizational learning, so the WZB maintained intellectual leadership of the project. It also had financial leadership, managing the funding for the international venture.³

Research that explores completely new territory requires a qualitative methodology (Eisenhardt, 1989). The WZB team developed a semi-structured interview guideline and subjected it to discussions with researchers and practitioners in several workshops, and then pre-tested and revised it. The instrument was discussed in depth with and then adapted by the project leader from China, Xinhua Zhang, and the researcher in Israel, Emily Udler, to suit their cultural contexts.⁴ The study focused on large companies⁵ in each country, whereby the size differed according to the setting. In China, 110 companies with 1000 to 20,000 employees were selected from five provinces. In Israel, 43 of the largest 100 companies were included in the study, and in Germany, 40 companies participated, of which most had over 5000 employees, except for those in the service sector, which tended to be somewhat smaller. The interviews were conducted in 1994 and the respondents were senior managers,⁶ whereby, here again, there was some difference between the countries that resulted from company size and organizational culture. In Israel, the interviews were conducted primarily with the Chief Executive Officer or his deputies. In Germany, most respondents were either members of the managing board or very senior managers a level or two below the board. In China, too, respondents came from top management, the difference being that in about a third of the companies the interviews were conducted with groups of up to five senior managers.⁷ The project leader from Germany participated in seven interviews in Israel and 10 interviews in China to ensure cross-fertilization as well as functional equivalence of the interview process.⁸

The interviews were taped and later transcribed, and those that were conducted in Mandarin or Hebrew were either translated verbatim or summarized in English to make them accessible to the other team members. The data were first analyzed systematically and separately by team members in each country. From this painstaking process, patterns emerged and were summarized in country reports. The team shared and discussed their results at a 10-day research retreat, challenging each other's interpretations and hammering out agreement on constructs and conclusions. The personal and emotional dimensions of data analysis and interpretation are rarely reported after a project is completed. This silence unfortunately leaves the impression that the work is entirely cognitive. The intensity of this retreat has become legendary at the research unit, and the emotional intellectual debates are symptomatic of the nature of international qualitative research and of power asymmetries in a multi-cultural research team. The process of challenging each other's interpretations of the data from their countries brought them face to face with their underlying, unquestioned cultural assumptions. It is the stuff of learning in an international context, but it is not a comfortable or easy process. The differences in seniority and gender created asymmetries in the team that flared into conflicts under this pressure. The ideas and conclusions that survived the test of this crucible are all the more robust for it.

The findings of the three-country study were presented in an All-Academy Symposium at the Annual Conference of the Academy of Management in Vancouver in August 1995 and written up in several articles and papers.⁹ It is beyond the scope of this article to present the data and conclusions in any depth, so just a few key points can be mentioned here. The interview data confirmed that managers have implicit theories of organizational learning, developed largely on the basis of their experiences, so a rich variety of implicit theories emerged. Nevertheless, patterns emerge from the implicit theories of the respondents within each country. Certain structures, features of organizational cultures, and human resource management concepts can be seen in the interviews to form clusters. In Germany, two clusters emerged, accounting for over 80% of the companies in the sample, which the researchers labeled 'monocentric' and 'polycentric' learning forms. The implicit theories of the Chinese respondents seem to lie on a continuum, with 'guided' learning at one end and 'self-generative' learning on the other. The landscape that emerges from the Israeli interviews is more fluid than in the other two countries. It is characterized by a sense of transition and searching for new forms. Two clusters could be identified there, namely 'centralistic' and 'decentralized' learning forms, but the majority of companies in Israel were described as hybrids undergoing a transformation process.

The significance of these findings is precisely that there is no 'one best way,' no single model for 'the learning organization,' contrary to the hopes expressed in the literature of the 1990s.¹⁰ The data from the implicit theories of the managers in the three countries cannot be reduced to the same clusters independent of national context. There is, however, a very significant feature common to all three countries and sets of clusters. The research indicates that an effective form for organizational learning requires a coherent combination of structure, culture, leadership, and human resource perspective. Managers cannot mix and match at will from a toolkit of leadership styles and cultural values. International managers cannot simply import structures or human resource 'best practices' from a different context to replace their current approach. The constellation matters and the pieces of the puzzle are not interchangeable. Rather than seeking the one best solution, the advice to managers is to seek a good match between these four elements.

A counterintuitive finding that emerged from the interviews in all three countries was that success impedes organizational learning. Crises were cited as a trigger for reconsidering engrained ways of seeing and behaving in an organization, for redesigning structures, and for reorienting strategies. In a crisis, the pressure to find new solutions is so high that changes become easier to introduce than in times of great success.

Like many stories, this one has an end, and it is also part of a never-ending story. The project ran out of steam in 1996, when both the young coordinating research assistant in Berlin and the Israeli researcher made career changes, and the senior researchers in Berlin and Shanghai moved on to other projects. Unfortunately, this ending meant that the anticipated dissertation about organizational learning in Germany was not completed, nor was the planned collaborative book written. The large project therefore generated fewer publications than the wealth of original data, a risk that the WZB takes when it engages in large-scale, innovative projects, particularly when such projects entail collaboration with several partners in different countries. Nevertheless, the intellectual and human capital that was developed in the course of the project led to new ventures because the WZB research unit maintained its programmatic interest in organizational learning. It launched an international, multi-disciplinary network on organizational learning in different contexts with support from the Gottlieb Daimler-and Karl Benz-Foundation. This 5-year venture encompassed numerous research projects and resulted in a bibliography of organizational learning (Dierkes et al., 1999, 2001a) and a handbook of organizational learning and knowledge (Dierkes et al., 2001b).¹¹ The handbook was translated into Mandarin under the co-editorship of Xinhua Zhang, providing scholars and managers in China with the first comprehensive work on the subject.

There were other medium-term benefits that accrued from the project. The experience gained in conducting empirical research in China stood the research unit in good stead for launching new empirical studies on topics as diverse as developing scenarios for the future of hydrogen engines in China, on the one hand, and understanding the role of Chinese repatriates as agents of organizational learning, on the other (Zhu, 2003; Canzler et al., 2008; Berthoin Antal and Bartz, 2006).

With help from the WZB team, Xinhua Zhang obtained funding from a German foundation for a series of workshops to teach organizational learning and change management in China. In 2002, the relationship between the WZB and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences was formalized when the president of the Academy signed an agreement on scholarly cooperation with the president of the WZB. Although no direct follow-up to the three-country study was undertaken in Israel, the international network project did launch collaborative research and teaching between members in the two countries.¹²

The research unit on Innovation and Organization, headed by Meinolf Dierkes until he retired in the fall of 2006, is currently completing its program. In its ongoing process of programmatic renewal, the WZB has recruited a new director, Michael Hutter, to launch a different stream of research under the heading of 'Cultural Sources of Newness.' In accordance with the charter of the WZB, that program, too, will have large-scale, international projects drawing on different disciplinary perspectives. The extent to which it will take advantage of the network in China that was built up in the earlier unit remains to be seen, but it will certainly draw on the intellectual capital accumulated by the members of the unit in the areas of organizational learning and innovation and with international, qualitative empirical research.

Organizational learning at the WZB

Organizational learning is not just a subject of research for the WZB, it is also part of the institution's own processes.¹³ A large research center like the WZB constantly faces the challenge of finding a balance between continuity and change and between specialization in specific fields and coherence as a whole.¹⁴ It must decide when to capitalize on its areas of expertise and when to leave them and break new ground. While it stretches out into different topics and with diverse disciplines, it also must attend to the potential linkages between research areas. In other words, the WZB, too, must engage in organizational learning. It must balance the exploitation of its strengths and the exploration of new areas, and it needs to undertake conscious unlearning. Over the years, the WZB has tried various mechanisms to support such processes, although it has never addressed the question explicitly as one of organizational learning. It is largely up to the president of the WZB to stimulate organization-wide activities to achieve the desirable balances, because the directors of the research units and research groups at the WZB, naturally, focus on their specific research programs.

Over the years, the WZB presidents have sought to strengthen existing mechanisms, introduced new ones, and tried to get the organization to unlearn in selected ways. In recent years, the WZB further broadened the spectrum of its research areas in order to utilize new scientific possibilities and to relate to pressing needs of the present time. During Jürgen Kocka's tenure as president (2001–2007), problems of civil society, of international and transnational policy networks (particularly in a new research unit directed by Michael Zürn), of migration and integration (under Ruud Koopmans' directorship since 2007), of governance and law were introduced to the WZB, and history was added as a discipline. The cooperation between different disciplines and research areas within the WZB was reemphasized. Processes of transnationalization received increased attention, while international comparison continued to be a major trademark of WZB research. Some research lines were discontinued. For example, the WZB had done pioneering work in the field of environmental policy, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. But when the field became established in many other institutions, the WZB decided to discontinue this stream and reassign resources to breaking ground in new areas. Classical WZB topics are being continued and addressed from fresh angles, for example Internationalization (Hedwig Rudolph; Arndt Sorge), industrial economics (Lars-Hendrick Röller), social inequality (Jens Alber), and democratic structures and processes (Wolfgang Merkel).

The president reports to the Board of Trustees (Kuratorium), which decides basic questions – budget, structure, starting and terminating research units, selection of the president and the research directors – usually on the basis of recommendations made from inside the WZB. The Federal Government and the Government of Berlin as well as the three Berlin universities have seats on the board, which also includes a number of independent scholars and members from other research institutes. Naturally, the representatives of the government, which provide most of the financial resources for the institution, have a strong voice in major policy decisions of the WZB. However, in keeping with the constitutional safeguards for the freedom of scientific work in Germany, as well as with the specific statutes of the WZB, the government representatives refrain from substantial interventions into the scientific life of the WZB. Therefore, the institution enjoys a significant degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the state, not least because the state recognizes that its own interests are usually best served through academic autonomy.

Another important factor in the development of the WZB are the intensive and elaborate processes of external evaluation. Various academic bodies, such as the German Science Council (Wissenschaftsrat) and the Senate of the Leibniz Society (a loose confederation of research institutions outside the university system in Germany), conduct evaluations of universities and research centers throughout the country, coming to the WZB every 6–8 years. They publish reports that can have an impact on the further financing and even existence of the evaluated institutes, particularly when the results are critical. The WZB invests a lot of time and energy in preparing for the evaluation procedures and the reports to date have been very positive. In the process, the institution has often received helpful observations and comments, which became topics of internal debate and led to further reform and improvement. Recognizing the importance of developing and applying appropriate procedures and criteria for evaluations – and the danger of using inappropriate ones – the WZB actively participates in debates and studies on the evaluation of research institutions.¹⁵

WZB's increasing diversification of topics and disciplines must be balanced by organizational reforms and devices that leave ample space and scope for each research unit to achieve its programmatic aims, yet help to ensure the necessary coherence of the institution as a whole. Active cooperation between research units and disciplines across the organizational boundaries is one of WZB's most important potentials. But centrifugal tendencies are strong. It is a constant task to counterbalance them and provide incentives to strengthen the lines of communication and the patterns of cooperation between the researchers, the units, and the disciplines.

The experience of the WZB illustrates the importance of actively managing boundary-spanning activities for organizational learning and points to the relevance of power and organizational politics in the process.¹⁶ Organizations do not exist or learn in a vacuum. They are embedded in socio-political, economic, and technological contexts, and they depend on their environment for various kinds of resources (e.g. financial, intellectual, and political). Because the WZB seeks to be an agenda-setter, it has to be attuned to emerging issues in society and to developments in the academic community.

The formal responsibility for acquiring relevant knowledge from the WZB's environment lies with its president. Some of the knowledge the organization requires is gathered informally by the members of the organization in the course of their work as social scientists. In other words, the WZB has a polycentric learning structure, to use the concepts generated from the research data in Germany. The accumulation of all this knowledge from the environment is of little use to the WZB until it becomes a collective property. To become usable for organizational learning, the externally acquired knowledge must be channeled into meetings, discussed, and interpreted so that implications and organizational action can be agreed on (Huber, 1991).

There are a number of institutional organs at the WZB that fulfill this function, most of which the president leads or influences. Some, such as the Wissenschaftlicher Rat (Academic Council), span internal boundaries, bringing together members of the organization from different research areas and functions. Formal and informal fora for discussion exist within the research units, too, and some of them cut across organizational structures. These interactions certainly contribute to processes of sense-making, often percolating interpretations and suggestions upwards to influence organs like the Academic Council. Other organs span boundaries between the WZB and its socio-political and academic environment. For example, the Scientific Advisory Board is composed of scholars from universities and research centers around the world. Managing boundary-spanning activities means more than acquiring information, however. It also entails actively engaging with diverse stakeholders, and it requires buffering the organization from excessive external influence that would interfere with its ability to fulfill its charter. The process of sense-making as a prelude to deciding what is to be maintained or changed in an organization is politically charged because organizational learning is not free of interests. The Scientific Advisory Board is particularly important in helping the WZB assess the relevance of developments in academia and in the political context, and its regular audits of each unit's work are useful in preparing the WZB for external evaluation processes.

The WZB was created in a historical constellation very different from today's. In 1969 both Berlin and Germany were divided. One of the intentions of the WZB's parliamentary founders was to strengthen the scientific, intellectual, and general position of West Berlin. When the wall came down, the once 'peripheral' area in which the WZB is located became one of the centers of the unified city. In 1969 the public expected a great deal from the social sciences, hoping they would provide knowledge and skills that would make rational political planning possible, improve the governance of the public realm, and guide the necessary reforms towards a better society. Nowadays, their expectations are more modest and realistic. The WZB and its scholars have learned how to engage with diverse stakeholders in society in an active process of sharing and creating knowledge.

Another major contextual change for the WZB is the reform of the university landscape that is currently underway. Germany has a long tradition of independent research institutes outside the universities, dating back to the early 20th century. These usually emerged because new types of research (large-scale, long-term interdisciplinary undertakings, financed by public–private partnerships or directed to specific purposes of application) did not always find easy acceptance and room for development inside the universities and their closely-knit collegial structures. The creation of organizations outside the university structure occurred particularly in the natural and technical sciences, but also in the humanities and in the social sciences (as is the case for the WZB). Most of these institutions belong to one of the four major umbrella organizations (the Max-Planck, the Helmholtz, the Fraunhofer, and the Leibniz Association), which help with financing, monitoring, and representing them to politics and the public. Overall, research in these autonomous institutes takes place under better, more comfortable conditions than research within the frequently overcrowded universities. Not surprisingly, the advantages as well as the costs of this organizational dualism are the subject of much discussion. Recently the German university system has begun to undergo important changes. As a result of nation-wide competitions between universities for the new status of 'excellence' more funds have been allocated to selected universities, particularly for long-term interdisciplinary research and new research structures. As a consequence, the distinctions between the type of research traditionally associated with the universities and that conducted by other institutions are becoming less distinct. This has the potential advantage of facilitating cooperation between universities and institutes, but it can also make relations more complex and competitive. The WZB is currently actively reviewing its profile to take the changes in the academic landscape into consideration and ensure that it builds on strengths accordingly.

The WZB has a long history of close cooperation with the social science departments of universities. This has taken numerous forms, such as joint appointments at the professorial/directorate level, common research projects, and the training of personnel. For example, student assistants, graduates, doctoral students, and postdocs are recruited into WZB projects and spend some time in the WZB before returning to their university (for passing an examination or teaching) or moving somewhere else. The WZB could not exist without such inputs from the universities, while, on the other hand, many WZB social scientists regularly contribute to the teaching program of the universities. Both sides profit from this constellation. Still, the landscape is changing, and the forms of coexistence and cooperation are likely to further intensify and change.

Like most successful institutions, the WZB has outlived the conditions under which it was created. Under the leadership of the sociologist Jutta Allmendinger, who became president in April 2007, the WZB will continue to renew itself. It will adjust to new needs and help to redefine them, for example by committing significant resources to the fields of educational and science policy. Findings in both of these areas could fuel organizational learning in Germany, strengthening its capacity to deal with the challenges of the future.¹⁷ In addition, the WZB will work on further increasing its public visibility as a place of social scientific research and reflection. Beyond being embedded as a key actor in the Berlin academic community, the WZB is an institution of national importance and a nexus within international and transnational networks. It will continue to play its role in the emergence of a European research area and in the increasing globalization of scientific life.

Notes

¹ The WZB's campus-like facility was designed by James Stirling, with Michael Wilford and Associates, around the historical building of the old Imperial Insurance Agency. For a description of the building and a discussion of the intention of the design for an academic context, see Kieren (1994). The connection between academic work and space was also the topic of an interdisciplinary study at the WZB by an anthropologist and a political scientist (Friese and Wagner, 1993).

² The founding fathers of the field are generally seen to be Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (1978) and James March and Johan P. Olsen (1975), but, as Bruce Kogut has pointed out, in many ways Karl W. Deutsch and his theory of cybernetics predate this work.

³ The study was financed largely internally by the WZB, with a small amount of support from the Gottlieb Daimler- and Karl Benz-Foundation.

⁴ The scope of the project in China was much larger than in Israel, so Xinhua Zhang composed a team with three other researchers at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, whereas one researcher sufficed in Israel. In Germany the team consisted of the project leader, Meinolf Dierkes, and his young research assistants, Birte Raske and Aline Hoffmann. Ariane Berthoin Antal, the expert on organizational learning in the unit, had a leave of absence from the WZB from 1992 to 1995, so she did not participate in the project design or data collection, but she helped during the final phases of the project after her return to the WZB and conducted interviews with the team members about their experiences in the research process.

⁵ In small companies it is harder than in large ones to distinguish between individual and organizational learning.

⁶ Because the study was exploratory and stretched across three countries, only one type of respondent was chosen, namely top managers who could be expected to have a broad overview over issues and processes in the organization. Future research should build on this study and expand the range of perspectives to include employees throughout the organization.

⁷ This situation was at first considered a potential problem by the German team, which feared that the data would be diluted or distorted by 'political correctness' in group discussions. However, what emerged instead was a lively debate among the participants that clarified and deepened the quality of the data collected.

⁸ The different size of the two countries had significant unexpected side effects. The project director and the Chinese team used their days of travel time in China for conversations about the country, research processes, organizational learning, and theory building. In Israel, by contrast, the short hops from one company to another did not provide such opportunities for sharing experiences, insights, and perspectives. Arguably, there was a greater need for such discussions with the members of the Chinese team, who had less experience in qualitative research and theory development than the Israeli partner. Moreover, the Chinese culture was more obviously foreign to the German members of the team than the Israeli context appeared to be (especially because the project director was involved in setting up a business school in Tel Aviv at the time and therefore had additional sources of insight into the local context). However, interviews conducted later with the various team members revealed that the shared travel time had nurtured a greater sense of mutual understanding of the research process in China than in Israel.

⁹ See, for example, Dierkes and Raske (1994), Dierkes and Zhang (1999, 2001), Udler (1999), and Berthoin Antal et al. (1999). Numerous additional articles were published in Mandarin.

¹⁰ This finding is consistent with those of WZB studies in other domains that reveal the problems incurred by seeking 'best practices.' See, for example, Jürgens and Meiner (2005) on the automotive industry and Oppen et al. (2005) on public sector management.

¹¹ The Handbook for Organizational Learning and Knowledge was a finalist for the Terry Book Award at the Academy of Management in 2002.

¹² For example, Friedman and Berthoin Antal (2005).

¹³ For a reflection on learning processes in and between academic organizations see Berthoin Antal (2006).

¹⁴ For an overview of the current range of themes covered by the WZB, see www.wzb.eu.

¹⁵ For example, the WZB is active in the IFQ (Institute for Research Information and Quality Control) in Bonn and has participated in experimental rating procedures by the Wissenschaftsrat. See also Simon and Röbbecke (2001).

¹⁶ Coopey (1995) was the first to draw attention to power as an underestimated and underresearched dimension of organizational learning. It has since been addressed empirically and critically, for example, by Filion and Rudolph (1999). See also LaPalombara (2001) for a comparison of the dynamics in public and private sector organizations, as well as the dissertation by Böhling (2007) on boundary-spanning activities in organizational learning.

¹⁷ For an overview of the challenges Germany faces in diverse policy areas and scenarios for dealing with them, see Kocka (2007).

References

1. Argyris, Chris and Donald Schön, 1978, Organizational learning – A theory of action perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
2. Berthoin Antal, Ariane, 2006, "Reflections on the need for between-times and between-places". Journal of Management Inquiry, 15(2): 154–166. | Article |
3. Berthoin Antal, Ariane and Jing Wang Bartz, 2006, "Organizational learning in China: The role of returners". Journal of Asia-Pacific Business, 7(1): 53–79. | Article |
4. Berthoin Antal, Ariane, Meinolf Dierkes and Lutz Marz, 1999, "Organizational learning in China, Germany and Israel". Journal of General Management, 25(1): 17–42.
5. Canzler, Weert, Meinolf Dierkes, Andreas Knie, Lutz Marz and Marc Weider, 2008, Verpasste Chancen der Modernisierung? China zwischen nachholender und alternativer Motorisierung [ Missed opportunity for modernization? China between catching up and alternative automotive technologies] . Berlin: edition sigma.
6. Böhling, Kathrin, 2007, Opening up the black box. Organizational learning in the European commission. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
7. Dierkes, Meinolf and Zhang Xinhua, 1999, "Organisationslernen in Chinesischen Unternehmen[ Orgnanizational learning in Chinese Companies] ", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 November, p. 71.
8. Coopey, John, 1995, "The learning organization. Power, politics and ideology". Management Learning, 26(2): 193–214. | Article |
9. Dierkes, Meinolf, Marcus Alexis, Ariane Berthoin Antal, Bo Hedberg, Peter Pawlowsky, John Stopford and Lai-Si Tsui-Auch (eds.) 1999, The annotated bibliography of organizational learning. Berlin: edition sigma.
10. Dierkes, Meinolf, Marcus Alexis, Ariane Berthoin Antal, Bo Hedberg, Peter Pawlowsky, John Stopford and Anne Vonderstein (eds.) 2001, The annotated bibliography of organizational learning and knowledge creation. 2nd edn, revised and expanded. Berlin: edition sigma.
11. Dierkes, Meinolf, Ariane Berthoin Antal, John Child and Ikujiro Nonaka (eds.) 2001, Handbook of organizational learning and knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
12. Dierkes, Meinolf and Birte Raske, 1994, "Blick zurück nach vorn. Wie Unternehmen lernen [ Looking back ahead: How Companies Learn] ". manager magazin, July, 140–148.
13. Dierkes, Meinolf and Xinhua Zhang, 2001, "Corporate transformation and organizational learning: The People's Republic of China". In D. Denison (ed.) Managing organizational change in transition economies. Mahwah, NJ, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, pp: 233–267.
14. Eisenhardt, Kathleen, 1989, "Building theories from case study research". The Academy of Management Review, 14(4): 532–550. | Article |
15. Filion, Norbert and Hedwig Rudolph, 1999, Power, control and organizational learning. WZB Discussion paper FS I 99-104, Berlin.
16. Friedman, Victor and Ariane Berthoin Antal, 2005, "Negotiating reality. A theory of action approach to intercultural competence". Management Learning, 36(1): 69–86. | Article |
17. Friese, Heidrun and Peter Wagner, 1993, Der Raum des Gelehrten. [ The scholar's space] . Berlin: edition sigma.
18. Hedberg, Bo, 1981, "How organizations learn and unlearn". In P.C. Nystrom and W.H. Starbuck (eds.) Handbook of Organizational Design. Vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp: 3–27.
19. Huber, George, 1991, "Organizational learning. The contributing processes and the literatures". Organization Science, 2(1): 88–115.
20. Janshen, Doris, 1979, Materialien zur Institutionalisierung des Wissenschaftszentrums Berlin [ Materials on the institutionalization of the Science Center Berlin] . WZB Discussion paper GS-1979/2.
21. Jürgens, Ulrich, Heinz-Rudolf Meiner and (in collaboration with Gröb, Elias and Bochum, Ulrich), 2005, Arbeiten am Auto der Zukunft. Produktinnovationen und Perspektiven der Beschäftigten [ Working on the automobile of the future. Product innovations and employees' perspectives] . Berlin: edition sigma.
22. Kieren, Martin, 1994, "Von der Summe der Details zum Ganzen. Der Gebäudekomplex des WZB von James Stirling, Michael Wilford & Associates [ From the sum of the details to the whole. The WZB building complex by James Stirling, Michael Wilford & Associates] ". 25 Jahre WZB. Art und Ort der Forschung [ 25 years WZB. Nature and place of research] . Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, pp: 107–128.
23. Kocka, Jürgen (ed.) 2007, Zukunftsfähigkeit Deutschlands. Sozialwissenschaftliche Essays. WZB-Jahrbuch 2006 [ Germany's capacity to deal with the future. Social science essays] . Berlin: edition sigma.
24. LaPalombara, Joseph, 2001, "Power and politics in organizations: Public and private sector comparisons". In M. Dierkes, A. Berthoin Antal, J. Child and I. Nonaka (eds.) Handbook of organizational learning and knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp: 557–581.
25. March, James and Johan P. Olsen, 1975, "The uncertainty of the past: Organizational learning under ambiguity". European Journal of Political Research, 3: 147–171. | Article |
26. Oppen, Maria, Detlef Sack and Alexander Wegener (eds.) 2005, Abschied von der Binnenmodernisierung? Kommunen zwischen Wettbewerb und Kooperation [ End of internal modernization? Local governments between competition and cooperation] . Berlin: edition sigma.
27. Przeworski, Adam and Henry Teune, 1971, The logic of comparative social inquiry. New York: Wiley.
28. Simon, Dagmar and Martina Röbbecke, 2001, Reflexive Evaluation. Ziele, Verfahren und Instrumente der Bewertung von Forschungsinstituten [ Reflexive evaluation. Objectives, procedures and instruments for evaluating research institutions] . Berlin: edition sigma.
29. Udler, Emily, 1999, Israeli business in transition. WZB Discussion paper FS II 99-101.
30. Wittrock, Björn, 1994, "A prominent institution of an unusual type". 25 Jahre WZB. Art und Ort der Forschung [ 25 years WZB. Nature and place of research] . Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, pp: 59–63.
31. WZB, 1994, 25 Jahre WZB. Art und Ort der Forschung [ 25 years WZB. Nature and place of research] . Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.
32. Zhu, Ying, 2003, Leapfrogging into hydrogen technology: China's 1990–2000 energy balance. WZB Discussion Paper SP III 03-116.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Meinolf Dierkes, Bruce Kogut, Christian Rabe, Dagmar Simon, and Paul Stoop for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.