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This article reviews theories of organizational learning and presents a framework with which to organize the literature. We argue that unit of analysis provides one critical distinction in the organizational learning literature and research objective provides another. The resulting two-by-two matrix contains four categories of research, which we have called: (1) residues (organizations as residues of past learning); (2) communities (organizations as collections of individuals who can learn and develop); (3) participation (organizational improvement gained through intelligent activity of individual members), and (4) accountability (organizational improvement gained through developing individuals' mental models). We also propose a distinction between the terms organizational learning and the learning organization. Our subsequent analysis identifies relationships between disparate parts of the literature and shows that …