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The importance of interorganizational networks in supporting or hindering the achievement of organizational objectives is now widely acknowledged. Network research is directed at understanding network processes and structures, and their impact upon performance. A key process is learning. The concepts of individual, group and organizational learning are long established. This article argues that learning might also usefully be regarded as occurring at a fourth system level, the interorganizational network. The concept of network learning - learning by a group of organizations as a group - is presented, and differentiated from other types of learning, notably interorganizational learning (learning in interorganizational contexts). Four cases of network learning are identified and analysed to provide insights into network learning processes and outcomes. It is proposed that 'network learning episode' offers a suitable unit of analysis for the empirical research needed to develop our understanding of this potentially important concept.

Jane Addams was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Citizen, Louise W. Knight's masterful biography, reveals Addams's early development as a political activist and social philosopher. In this book we observe a powerful mind grappling with the radical ideas of her age, most notably the ever-changing meanings of democracy. Citizen covers the first half of Addams's life, from 1860 to 1899. Knight recounts how Addams, a child of a wealthy family in rural northern Illinois, longed for a life of larger purpose. She broadened her horizons through education, reading, and tr

In writing a half-life biography of Jane Addams, the author faced the difficult decision of choosing a point of view from which to interpret her life. She knew that somehow she would have to find a way to be wiser than Jane Addams—at least the adult Jane Addams—and she was not sure, given the narrowness of her life when compared to hers, that she could. Eventually, however, the author realized she could compare Addams to herself. By 1899, when the biography ends, after 10 years at Hull House, Addams's ideas about the morality of the labor movement, the adaptability of social ethics to their times, and about her own class's presumed superiority to working-class people had changed from what she had believed in 1889. Addams's continuing determination to face her own moral confusions and revise her ideas shaped her life and offers an example from which many can learn.

Oratory, the act of speaking in public on civic matters, remained a male prerogative in the United States until the 1830s, when increasing numbers of women began ignoring the taboo and established a female oratorical tradition. This essay outlines how American women claimed the authority to speak and then developed their tradition, which was a social reform in itself, over three generations. It then examines how the youthful Jane Addams, a member of the third generation who became a social reformer, gained her education as an orator and struggled in new ways with society's continuing doubts about women's civic authority.

AbstractJane Addams, founder and head of Hull House, a social settlement in Chicago at the turn of the century, offers an intriguing model of a nonhierarchical, value‐oriented manager and leader. As the head resident of a group of some twenty volunteer residents—the staff of the settlement—Addams created an organizational culture and structure that encouraged individual initiative and self‐governance. Addams herself taught by example the value of tolerance and the meaning of social democracy, the moral goals whose attainment she sought.