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Faculty Books: The Ambiguities of Experience


 

Ambiguities Experience

The Ambiguities of Experience
by James G. March
Cornell University Press, 2010

 

 



"Experience may be the best teacher, but it is not a particularly good teacher," Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor James March says in his new book, The Ambiguities of Experience. Whether experience is the best teacher, or the teacher of fools, makes March reflect on the unexpected problems organizations (and the individuals in them) face when they rely on experience to adapt, improve, and survive.

In The Ambiguities of Experience, James G. March asks a deceptively simple question: What is, or should be, the role of experience in creating intelligence, particularly in organizations? Folk wisdom both trumpets the significance of experience and warns of its inadequacies. On one hand, experience is described as the best teacher. On the other hand, experience is described as the teacher of fools, of those unable or unwilling to learn from accumulated knowledge or the teaching of experts. The disagreement between those folk aphorisms reflects profound questions about the human pursuit of intelligence through learning from experience that have long confronted philosophers and social scientists. This book considers the unexpected problems organizations (and the individuals in them) face when they rely on experience to adapt, improve, and survive.

Selected Reviews

 

Administrative Science Quarterly

Reviewer: Anne Miner

'James G. March's work creates a sense of being in a conversation with someone who persistently points to important things that somehow lie just outside of our ordinary awareness.'

 
Contemporary Sociology

Reviewer: John Padgett

'March is to organization theory what Miles Davis was to jazz. . . . March's influence, unlike that of any of his peers, is not limited to any possible subset of the social science disciplines; it is pervasive.'

 

New York University

Reviewer: Zur Shapira

"Those of us who cherish the dialectical analysis and the understanding of organizational action it provides have the same feeling when reading March's writing as when watching a movie directed by the legendary Kurosawa; they leave us with a deeper understanding and with a desire to taste more."