Apprendimento organizzativo e ricerca-intervento. L'organizzazione degli individui

The relationship between individuals and organization is a recurrent issue in organization theories. Both the overestimated determinism of the objectivist vision and the total indeterminism of the subjectivist conception deny that individuals involved in the organizing processes - at any level - intentionally drive the processes. In our search for a cross-fertilization between two theoretical fields concerning organizational phenomena - organizational learning and action research – we also encountered the problem of dualism. Our approach overcomes the dualism “individual-system” by focusing on social processes: paraphrasing Elias, our unit of analysis are "organizations of individuals" or, in other words, processes of actions and decisions which develop and change over time according to intentional and bounded rationality. Our approach seems to be consistent with the epistemology of Norbert Elias, and we think it can benefit from a confrontation with his social theory.