Downloaded by UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND (AUS) At 03:42 09 March 2018 (PT) 2 There are many different approaches to defining a concept such as the learning organization. Three such approaches will be addressed here (for a fuller presentation of these approaches, see Örtenblad, 2010). Of these three approaches, two are more label-focused and one is more content-focused. To start with the label-focused approaches, one fairly common approach is – in cases where the label consists of more than one word, as is the case with the labels of learning organization and organizational learning – to define the individual elements of the label and thereafter add up these two meanings. This approach, which could be called the fragmentary approach, would imply that “learning” and “organization” first are defined individually, and that these two definitions are subsequently put together. Another label-focused approach is the wholeness approach, which takes its inspiration from the theory of “combined concepts” (e.g. Wisniewski, 1997), implying that concepts change when they are combined. Thus, the concept of the learning organization may mean something different or even very different from the sum of the definitions of its two constituencies, whilst still being connected to the label. The third, more content-focused approach is the interpretive approach, where a concept is defined according to how it is used, that is, which meaning or meanings are given to a concept in various situations and by various people. In the below section, where the learning organization is defined, I first use a mix of the wholeness approach and the interpretive approach, and thereafter a more pure form of the interpretive approach to define the learning organization.