The key might be in the dark zone: How old knowledge can deviate organizational learning

This paper explores how learning agents actively use an established body of organizational knowledge to situate new learning initiatives. Through an exploratory case study in a knowledge-based context we focus on the early stages of a technological learning. We identify various practices that dominant experts intentionally adopt to oppose the new learning initiative. Doing so, experts benefit from the depth and maturity of the established cognition, as well as the emerging and ambiguity state of the new knowledge. We typify these situating practices into nineteen mechanisms that affect the content, process, context, and outcome of organizational learning. Accordingly, we discuss several potentials of cognitive and practice-based theories to examine the interplay between cognition and action, beyond the routine mode of knowing.