Title: Sub-cultures as leverage for organisational learning and lean thinking

Authors: Jennifer Karlin

Addresses: Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, 501 East St. Joseph Street, Rapid City, SD 57701, USA

Abstract: Sub-cultures within the organisation or the enterprise (a chain of organisations) rarely receive sufficient attention considering the role they play in sustaining or changing the dominant culture of an organisation. This paper specifically considers the role of sub-cultures as it addresses one step of a project to create, validate and use experimentally an indicator that captures the level of organisational learning for multiple levels of the organisational culture without the members of the organisation repeatedly completing the instrument. This is done through revisiting two case studies and comparing the results of the previous analysis of these cases to the rating scale created for the new instrument.

Keywords: organisational learning; organisational culture; learning pockets; learning enterprise; lean manufacturing; lean logistics; sub-cultures; Transfreight; Toyota; Canadian Automotive Manufacturing, Inc; CAMI; North America; lean thinking; automobile industry.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCENT.2009.029286

International Journal of Collaborative Enterprise, 2009 Vol.1 No.2, pp.147 - 159

Published online: 18 Nov 2009 *

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