Embodied Cognition, Organization and Innovation

This chapter explains and employs a constructivist, interactionist theory of knowledge that has come to be known as the perspective of 'embodied cognition'. That view has roots in earlier developmental psychology, and in sociology, and more recently has received further substance from neural science.It yields a basis for a cognitive theory of the firm, with the notion of cognitive distance between people, the resulting view of organization as a cognitive focusing device, the need for external relations with other organizations to compensate for organizational myopia, and the notion of optimal cognitive distance between firms for innovation by interaction.