Guest editorial: new horizons in organizational cognition

Abstract

The expression “organizational cognition” (OC) has been around for quite some time now (Ilgen et al., 1994; Hodgkinson and Healey, 2008; Walsh, 1995). Applications, more than theoretical developments, gave OC a place within the management literature so that a cognitive component is found more and more often in published research. Yet, what the word “cognition”means within the context of organizations remains vague and highly dependent on theoretical assumptions (Secchi and Adamsen, 2017). On the one hand, cognition is addressed starting from more traditional organizational characteristics, with attention to, among the many, leadership (Lord and Emrich, 2001), teams and groups (Ilgen et al., 2005; Toma and Butera, 2015) and individual social responsibility (Crilly et al., 2008; Secchi, 2009). On the other hand, organization theory and behavior are addressed from the perspective of cognition, with particular emphasis to, for example, cultural ecologies (Hutchins, 2014), human interactivity (Steffensen and Pedersen, 2014) and decision-making (Bardone, 2011; Toma and Butera, 2009). The former, and more traditional, assumptions can be called representationalistwhile the latter belong to the embodied, distributed and extended cognition (EDEC) perspective. When taking a representationalist stance, researchers operate on the assumption that cognitive processes involve the mirroring of the observed in a cognitive “device.” Traditionally, this has been considered to be the human brain, where observed phenomena are represented. The EDEC perspectives take a different set of assumptions and make the issue of representation secondary, when not irrelevant. This is not the place to get involved in the debate between these two streams of research because (1) it is a relatively old one (e.g. Varela et al., 1991), and (2) it is not the central message of this editorial. All thatmatters here is that an EDEC stance consists in defining cognition as a systemwhere a number of internal resources (e.g. brain, body, feelings) aremixed and interplaywith external resources (e.g. artifacts, other people). Even though there has been a long tradition of EDEC perspectives in the cognitive sciences (Varela et al., 1991; Hutchins, 1995), they have not been recognized in OC until very recently. For example, Healey et al. (2018) discuss distributed cognition within a representationalist framework, and Hodgkinson (2015) has acknowledged their existence in his influential review of managerial and organizational cognition (MOC). The two lines of reasoning about OC are still separate but, perhaps, less irreconcilable. Of course, some would keep a radical take while others would want to establish a dialogue and explore the territory around their field. This Special Issue New Horizons in Organizational Cognition has been created with the intention of drawing attention to the different aspects of cognition research applied to and concerning organizations in an attempt to understand the extent to which the two stances above communicate, diverge, merge or dialogue. The idea was that of encouraging a reflection starting from diverse theoretical perspectives, e.g. computationalism and its opposite, social identity theory, mental representationalism and its critics, sensemaking, as well as from different disciplinary traditions, even if outside organizational theory and behavior, e.g. cognitive psychology, social cognition, cognitive science, artificial intelligence. This would have encouraged a wide approach to OC and, at the same time, helped frame where next can the field move toward. The Special Issue was specifically designed to attract those perspectives that serve as a bridge between existing and forthcoming OC studies. This offers a wider opening to more Guest editorial