The Lost Experiment in Exploration and Exploitation

This paper focuses on James March’s 1991 article on 'Exploration and Exploitation in
Organizational Learning', which is now the seventh most highly cited paper in
management and organisation studies. March’s paper is based on a computer program
that simulates the collective and individual learning of a group of fifty individuals. The
largely forgotten story that this paper re-calls is the real-life experiment that March, in
large part, designed and conducted when he was the new 'boy Dean' of the School of
Social Sciences in the University of California at Irvine between 1964 and 1969. Taken
together, both stories illuminate important moments in the history of organisation
studies. The comparison suggests that March’s model, which was probably the first
simulation of an organisation learning, also worked to constitute rather than model the
phenomenon.