Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 836

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 59 of the 59 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Organizational knowledge, learning and memory: three concepts in search of a theory

Spender, J.‐C.·1996·Journal of Organizational Change Management

Abstract

There is much interest in organizational knowledge following the recognition of its strategic place in inter‐firm competition, but there is no adequate theory of such knowledge, or of its acquisition, storage and application. Penrose’s (1959) theory of the growth of the firm, Nelson and Winter’s (1982) evolutionary economics, and the gestalt notions of discontinuous perceptual change taken from Lewin (1935), still define the cutting edge of the learning and knowledge‐based approaches to the firm. Compared with these field‐shaping works, the recent literature on organizational knowledge, learning and memory seems inconclusive. Takes a new start from the Jamesian distinction between knowing what and knowing how, and the Durkheimian distinction between individual and social forms of knowledge. The resulting pluralistic organizational epistemology implies a dynamic theory of the firm as a dialectical system of knowledge processes.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1108/09534819610156813

Cites

59 of 59 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 59 references

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Spender, J. ‐.
Venue
Journal of Organizational Change Management
Publisher
Emerald
Published
1996-02-01
Volume
9
Issue
1
Pages
63-78
ISSN
0953-4814 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W1976810358
Cited by
836
References
59
FWCI
31.21
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Organizational knowledge, learning and memory: three concepts in search of a theory. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1108/09534819610156813
The paper
Spender, J. ‐. (1996). Organizational knowledge, learning and memory: three concepts in search of a theory. Journal of Organizational Change Management. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534819610156813

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.