Research in the Management of Learning, Change and Relations

This note sketches opportunities for interdisciplinary research in management, and the distinctive contribution that might be made from a European perspective. It highlights a few major domains of research, conceptual issues, disciplines, and specific opportunities and needs in Europe. The domains of research considered are: - the management of learning, innovation and change in organisations and, related to that: - the management of inter-organisational relations, alliances, social capital. There are opportunities here for innovative combinations of some branches of economics (institutional economics, evolutionary economics, the 'competence view'), sociology (population ecology, social capital and social structure, social psychology) and cognitive science (theories of knowledge, learning and language, cognitive and evolutionary psychology). In these areas of innovative, integrative, theoretical/conceptual, interdisciplinary research, Europe has a comparative advantage over the US. US research tends to be more incremental, technical and narrow. The research indicated here requires outlets for publication that are more receptive to such work than the current journals of the Academy of Management.