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Cognition Beyond the Brain pp 305–331Cite as

Organisational Cognition: A Critical Look at the Theories in Use

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Abstract

This chapter is concerned with exploring the ontology of organisational cognition (OC) through conceptual mapping in order to recognise and understand what OC really is about. The objective is not to provide a comprehensive literature review of this area, but to map the concept so that both meaning and extent of its reach can be better defined. In so doing, the article considers several perspectives under which the domain of “organisation” interacts with or relate to “cognition” (or it does not do so). A table that summarises similarities and differences among approaches is presented. Finally, the table is then used as a tool to demonstrate overlaps, gaps, and define possible directions for future research in the OC field.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here is our list: Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Administrative Science Quarterly, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Personnel Psychology. A mainstream journal is one that usually covers research topics that are commonly accepted as being part of a field or discipline. Its articles attract, on average, more citations than others and can be identified by bibliometric indices (e.g., Davis and Eisemon 1989; Nagpaul and Sharma 1994—both in Scientometrics). In the context of this research, a mainstream journal is one that ranks atop the latest Journal Citation Report by ISI Thomson for the discipline ‘management’. We excluded journals unlikely to cover cognition because their aim seemed far from the topic (e.g., Journal of Information Technology, Omega) and those with too limited issues per year (e.g., Academy of Management Annals). We compared the 2014 ranking to previous years and the journals meeting these excluding criteria are also those that do not appear permanently in top positions. We also tried to include journals that traditionally cover cognition and have a high impact factor although they are not in the top ten (e.g., Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior).

  2. 2.

    In this chapter the attention is limited to these four approaches, but the various combinations among the two diagrams in Fig. 15.3 can also include: (e)—organisation, an approach that uses the organisation as a conscious or unconscious benchmark to define cognition; (f)—organisation U organisation, this approach considers everything that is not organisation to define cognition but it then includes it back in; (g)—cognition, OC can be defined by everything but cognition and this is a way to define organisations as not affected by anything that can be related to cognition.

  3. 3.

    We refer to the circumstance that sees the work of these scholars as a study of how a not better specified ‘information’ is used by the decision maker. Under this angle, it makes not difference whether the information is coming from another human being, from a computer, or any other social media. Instead, we claim this is exactly what makes organisations interesting. From a cognitive (and psychological) perspective, information coming from a social source makes the world of difference. Although partially inspired by Kahneman, Tversky and others, studies on advice giving and taking have started to unveils some of these aspects, at least from a psychological perspective (for a review, see Bonaccio and Dalal 2006).

  4. 4.

    Menary (2010) leaves the ‘ecological’ out and substitutes it with the ‘extended’; although the extended is also very important, we believe it is rather a constituent allowing distributed system to work rather than one of the characteristics of its processes. Magnani (2007) for example, characterises two basic constituents as ‘externalising’ and ‘re-projecting’ to describe the ‘smart interplay’ (Clark and Chalmers 1998). As it is apparent in the text above, we are not discarding the extended features of cognition, rather emphasising those processes that would be particularly important to take into consideration with OC.

  5. 5.

    This is, for example, a computer-generated message or an automatic production process that follows a routine that once required human intervention but it is currently independent from it. That would characterise the process as mostly organisational and probably only indirectly related to cognition. Vice versa, there are purely cognitive processes that cannot be related to the organisation.

  6. 6.

    A complete coverage of the model of organisational cognition through a radical systemic perspective is out of the scope of this chapter but it can be retrieved from a paper that was recently presented at the European Academy of Management conference by Secchi and Cowley (2016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. COMAC Research Cluster, Centre for Human Interactivity (CHI), Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Slagelse, Denmark

    Davide Secchi

  2. Zealand Institute of Business & Technology, Slagelse, Denmark

    Billy Adamsen

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  1. Davide Secchi
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Correspondence to Davide Secchi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Slagelse, Denmark

    Stephen J. Cowley

  2. Department of Psychology, Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom

    Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau

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Secchi, D., Adamsen, B. (2017). Organisational Cognition: A Critical Look at the Theories in Use. In: Cowley, S., Vallée-Tourangeau, F. (eds) Cognition Beyond the Brain. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49115-8_15

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