The Contribution of Mary Parker Follett's Theories to a Generative Theory of Organizational Learning

Approaching organization and organizing as an educational phenomenon is part of a research agenda on organizational education anchored in education science. In a contribution to the debate on organizing as educational, this paper presents insights from Mary Parker Follett’s engaged theorizing on collective creativeness, to higlight organizational learning as generative on ‘the motor level’ (Follett, 1924) of organizing and of organizing for change and development. <br/>Reporting historical information not previously published regarding Follett’s method and her citizen and community engagement, offering a context of lived experience as background to her theorizing, O’Connor (2024) recently foregrounded how Follett teaches a method of using experience in developing one’s decision to meet and keep meeting grand challenges: “every situation brings an opportunity to enligthen and strenghen oneself”. This entails becoming, first, “experience-conscious that things of significance are going on in one’s life”. Then, “explor[ing] the significance of an experience and transfer it into action and character” (p. 3), realizing significance grows “through its relation to the purposes which are being simultaneously expressed by many others”. Doing so, one is continuously and integratively navigating that “’[t]here are always larger circumferences, larger settings, for one’s thoughts and acts.’” (quoting Follett, 1928 in O’Connor, 2024, p.3). <br/>Two ongoing research and development projects through which author carries first-person experience and responsibility, provide the empirical experience from which this paper theorize about Follett’s contribution to a generative theory of organizational learning. One case study (1), extending from November 2023 to January 2025, is a collaborative autoetnhography of citizen participation in new garbage recycling pratices (Beavan &amp; Revsbæk, 2024; Revsbæk &amp; Beavan, 2024) in a sustainability transformation implemented in many European societies following an EU directive from 2018 (EU Directive 852, 2018). To understand the self-educative process of citizen everyday engagement in large-scale, societal sustainability transformation, the travelling through early months of new garbage recycling implementation have been studied specifically in the city of Aarhus, Denmark (Beavan &amp; Revsbæk, 2024). The small-scale study of large-scale transformation enlists researchers-as-citizens to understand the psychic borderlands (Anzaldúa, 2012) of societal transformation as citizens engage to develop their participation in altered demands and practices. A second study (2), unfolding in participatory action research collaborations between university-based researchers and employee and management practitioners in a public sector welfare organization during 2021-2024 faced with high newcomer turnover (Persson &amp; Revsbæk, 2024), develops employee onboading through an organizational learning of practice-experimenting and inventive inquiry collaborations. Its process experience is taken up and considered for theorizing in light of a documented success in lowered newcomer turnover in the case welfare organization during the project period, and as a sister organization is contracting a similar collaborative and organizationally learning transformation process in a research collaboration with the university. <br/>To elaborate Follett’s contribution to a generative theory of organizational learning, her undersatnding of the evolving situation and actors’ relation in continued, engaged, responding action to meet the situation at hand and its dynamically evolving complexity is explained, as is her understanding of integrative behavior and creative, progressive experimentation (Follett, 1918; 1924; Metcalf &amp; Urwick, 1940). To situate her contribution in organizational education research, the plausvalue of her theorizing to existing pragmatist scholarship on organizational learning, emphazing collective inquiry and altered practice participation (Brandi &amp; Elkjær, 2012; Elkjaer, 2003; Shields, 2003) is discussed and related to the research memorandum of organizational education (Göhlich, Novotný, Revsbæk, Schröer, Weber, &amp; Yi, 2018). <br/>The paper presents key concepts in Follett’s theories to an audience of organizational education scholars for the advancement of understanding organizing for change as educational. Drawing on two empirical cases of participatory, change-oriented inquiry the paper, in addition, suggests less-explored areanas for organizational learning: citizen engagement in societal sustainability transformation and researcher-practitioner collaborations to develop organizational change. <br/>