Study of relations between organizational learning and quality systems in Brazilian mechanic industry

Summary form only, as given. The concept of learning organizations or of the organizational learning issue began in 1977 with Cris Argyris. Since then, several authors have treated the theme with different approaches. Although, any that is the adopted concept, it requests that the company develops abilities, turn itself to learning and promote changes in its internal culture. For offering an organization structure and documentation, the quality systems can be configured as key for those changes. The present article is a partial result of a research that tries to investigate how and in which degree the quality systems provide and sustain the organizational learning in the companies. There are presented, in this article, the concepts of learning organizations based on disciplines or activities, the relationship of those disciplines/activities with the quality systems and the preliminary results of the field research applied in two industrial companies