Cognition Within and Between Organizations: Five Key Questions

This special issue of Organization Science taps into the burgeoning work on managerial and organizational cognition. In the last 15 years, there has been a decided “cognitive turn” within organizational studies as researchers increasingly explore the relationships among mind, management, and organization. The early groundwork established by the Carnegie School of organizational theory, the success of modern cognitive science, and the recent diffusion of social constructionism within organizational studies have all contributed to this growing interest in cognitive research. Researchers are now exploring the cognitive underpinnings of such diverse organizational phenomena as job attitudes, performance appraisals, managerial decision making, environmental sensemaking, organizational learning, and interorganizational belief systems. Few areas of contemporary organizational science remain untouched by a cognitive agenda. In this short paper, we introduce the special issue by discussing the issue's focus and highlighting several key questions that constantly recur within the cognitivist agenda illustrated by these papers.