Chapter 21 Situated learning and brokerage as keys to successful knowledge production: An experiential review

Abstract

We both arrived at Stanford in September 1982 to begin the Ph.D. program at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). The beginning was not auspicious; it rained heavily during orientation, an unusual event in itself, but a fitting precursor to one of the worst El Niňo's on record. By February of our first winter in California, there was one period in which it rained 60 of the prior 63 days. The cold and the wet did not dampen our curiosity or that of our cohort, however, as we began the required Organizational Behavior class with GSB Professor James March in January 1983. We emerged from the shock of the first semester of graduate school into a course that powerfully underscored the interdisciplinary nature of the doctoral program at the GSB. Because the syllabus actively engaged the literature of rational choice in making the case for behavioral perspectives, students from all disciplines were drawn into the discussion. We learned more about rational choice in the many discussions that ensued in this cross-disciplinary climate than in our graduate economics classes. More importantly, we learned through experience that the individual mind is not an adequate level of analysis to understand the dynamics of the organizations community at Stanford in the early 1980s. Only in retrospect, though, can we appreciate fully the uniqueness of that time and place, and the resulting impact of scholarship that emerged from this context. For this reason, our discussion will emphasize a situated learning perspective to comprehend the Stanford phenomenon. The resulting de-emphasis of the individual mind as the focal repository of knowledge and emphasis on interactions among actors and sources of embedded knowledge is not intended to slight the role of incredibly intelligent individuals and the stellar intellects that surrounded us. Rather, we adopt a situated perspective because it provides a mechanism for traversing the large Stanford community and its multiple levels of analysis without resorting to aggregation, dominant coalitions, or anthropomorphized learning units. Although we will confine our examples of activities and dynamics to the community at the GSB that we knew best, we also believe that other communities of practice were similar to varying degrees. The importance of these other communities will be implicit in our discussion of the role of bridges linking these dense networks of situated learning.

Citation

Mezias, S. and Lant, T. (2010), "Chapter 21 Situated learning and brokerage as keys to successful knowledge production: An experiential review", Bird Schoonhoven, C. and Dobbin, F. (Ed.) Stanford's Organization Theory Renaissance, 1970–2000 (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 28), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 351-357. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X(2010)0000028025