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Improvisation and Learning in Organizations— An Opportunity for Future Empirical Research

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, mtv{at}cbs.dk

Since the mid 1990s improvisation in organizations has attracted increasingly more attention from scholars of organizations, but in Management Learning, articles investigating learning and improvisation in organizations are absent, even if reviews of the literature on organizational improvisation suggest close links between the two concepts. Hence, there appears to be room for scholars to pursue empirical studies of connections between improvisation and learning in organizations, and thus, the purpose of this article is to provide inspiration for production and publication of such studies in Management Learning. First, the article presents a commonly accepted definition of improvisation. Thereafter, it looks at connections between improvisation and learning in organizations, and it describes recent empirical research investigating relationships between learning and improvisation in organizations. It then addresses challenges facing scholars of improvisation and learning in organization, and finally, it identifies interesting organizational contexts for empirical studies of improvisation and learning in organizations.

Key Words: empirical studies • improvisation • jazz • learning • organizations

Management Learning, Vol. 40, No. 4, 449-456 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1350507609339684


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