Organizational learning in novel policy situations: two cases of United States communications regulation

During the last three and a half decades, a growing body of scholarship has characterized policy-making as a process of ‘learning’. Recent scholarship has further suggested that a more narrow focus on organizational learning – learning within specific types of governing bodies – might provide greater analytical and methodological precision. While scholars of organizational learning disagree about some of the specifics, most agree that organizations learn when they successfully acquire and use knowledge to alter policy outputs, worldviews, or both. Thus, a major goal of recent learning scholarship has been to better understand the factors that shape knowledge acquisition and utilization under a variety of circumstances. The purpose of this article is to build on the literature by further clarifying the factors that facilitate organizational learning under conditions of policy novelty and scientific uncertainty. It is argued that three principal factors – analogical reasoning, knowledge acquisition strategies, and mental frames – interact to determine whether or not organizations can learn in such situations. A series of theoretical propositions relating to these factors are outlined and then applied to two contrasting cases of US communications regulation.