• Redundancy is crucial for the survival of the system in the long term. It manifests
itself through various forms, both in terms of information, material resources or
competencies. Redundancy therefore permits the system to open widely the range
of available responses to the environment change.
In the next point we try to deep the analysis of the first condition as long as we assume that
collective knowledge emerges from a self-organising process inside the firm.
1.1.3 Emergence and Knowledge
On the assumption that the firm is a complex and adaptive system (Stacey, 1995; Church,
1999) we can understand the interactions which are set up within the firm and how they prove
to be essential for a process where (collective) learning emerges as a property of the system.
That is, as a reality where, although it does not imposes itself to the individual as a given, it
does not also reduce itself to the sum of individual knowledge.
Adopting a constructive epistemology, Hatchuel (1999) studied the ‘activities of conception’
within the firms and pointed out the importance of the non-splitting between learning and
action. On the other hand, Ngo-Mai and Rocchia (1999) studied further these interactions.
They looked at the distinction between mental ‘occurring’ and ‘type’ representations as
identified by the cognitive sciences. The interactions that are established among individuals in
the firm depend upon the technical and functional division of labour that, on its turn, is
conditioned by the need to ensure interaction between close or complementary competencies.
In this case, the sharing of knowledge is made through the occurring representations of the
individual. On the contrary, the coherence of the organisation is kept through the sharing of
long-run memory; that is of the type representations of certain individuals working in
different sectors of the firm. This most certainly creates the routines that frame the individual
action.
Thus, from the complex and adaptive systems perspective, we may infer that the individual
acquisition of learning, action and interaction among different actors play an essential role in
what concerns the emergence of collective learning in the firm.