Learning Curve? Which One?
Journal Title: BAR: Brazilian Administration Review - Year 2004, Vol 1, Issue 1
Abstract
Learning curves have been studied for a long time. These studies provided strong support to the hypothesis that, as organizations produce more of a product, unit costs of production decrease at a decreasing rate (see Argote, 1999 for a comprehensive review of learning curve studies). But the organizational mechanisms that lead to these results are still underexplored. We know some drivers of learning curves (ADLER; CLARK, 1991; LAPRE et al., 2000), but we still lack a more detailed view of the organizational processes behind those curves. Through an ethnographic study, I bring a comprehensive account of the first year of operations of a new automotive plant, describing what was taking place on in the assembly area during the most relevant shifts of the learning curve. The emphasis is then on how learning occurs in that setting. My analysis suggests that the overall learning curve is in fact the result of an integration process that puts together several individual ongoing learning curves in different areas throughout the organization. In the end, I propose a model to understand the evolution of these learning processes and their supporting organizational mechanisms.
Authors and Affiliations
Paulo Prochno
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP40379
- DOI -
- Views 359
- Downloads 0
The Regional Concentration of Industries and the Performance of Firms: a Multilevel Approach
This paper presents the results of a study whose objective was to understand how location within industrial concentrations, like clusters or industrial districts, affects the financial performance of firms. In its theor...
Promoting and selecting strategy-aligned projects through consensus in universities — An artifact
Project portfolio management has been studied through diverseaspects. Differentapproaches havebeen used to improveproject portfolio selection,but not all of themhave been actually used. This studypresents a...
Unlocking the Institutionalization Process: Insights for an Institutionalizing Approach
The neoinstitutional theory has been characterized by some scholars in the field of organizational studies as a supposedly deterministic approach. We will demonstrate in this paper that this characterization cannot be...
The Meanings of the Death of the Founder: The Constructionist Approach
The aim of this article is to investigate the meanings constructed around the death of a university center’s founder. For this purpose, the culture theory and the social constructionism approach formed the theoreticalme...
Sales Managers’ Performance and Social Capital: the Impact of an Advice Network
The aim of this study is to research a sales manager’s social network and demonstrate that sales managers who are central in closure structures of an advice network achieve high sales performance. Considering the result...