Contextualising organisational learning: Lyles and Salk in the context of their research

Hungary has been the focus of Lyles and Salk (1996) because their research interest, organisational learning, was of particular concern in joint ventures in that country at that time. This allowed them to investigate in greater depth what drives knowledge acquisition, and how it influences the performance of joint ventures. This commentary reviews the contribution by Lyles and Salk, as reflected in the subsequent literature. The setting of the study in Hungary 1993 raises the challenging question of how this particular context may have influenced the research outcomes. I argue that the national context of radical environmental change and the organisational context of joint ventures incorporating privatised state firms crucially influence processes of organisational learning. The importance of context suggests modifying future research agendas in international business, and in organisational learning in particular. I thus suggest that future research should incorporate context more explicitly to establish boundary conditions for theory, and to develop managerially relevant insights.