Reading between the lines: Learning as a process between organizational context and individuals’ proclivities

• This paper focuses on the micro-foundations of organizational learning.
• It focuses on two perspectives: role identity and attention control.
• These two perspectives can be used to study learning at different levels of analysis.
• An application to the ambidexterity discussion is presented.

SummaryCritical firm-level results, such as strategic renewal and sustainable firm performance are recurrently attributed to organizational learning. Yet, many scholars claim that this firm-level phenomenon has not been sufficiently broken down and connected with lower level activities. Consequently, this paper intends to focus on two nascent conceptual bridges for linking macro- and micro-level structures and processes in the organizational learning literature: (organizational) identity and (organizational) attention. We first briefly review these two approaches, trying to show their complementarities. We shall argue that research on identity and attention is delivering results useful to establish suitable foundations to the organizational learning literature; that both can be scaled up from the individual level to do justice to the multilevel nature of learning and finally that both lend themselves to the analysis of the seemingly unsolvable tension between exploitation and exploration in organizational learning.