The challenges for the future will be to nurture the recent attempts to grapple with the role of emotions, power, and conflict in organizational learning. Several chapters in the handbook can serve as points of departure for such research. Improved understanding of the role of emotions in learning can be expected when today's generally accepted duality between rationality and emotions in organizational research is overcome. Taking a step in this direction, Scherer and Tran (Ch. I show the variety of ways in which emotions can either support or impede organizational learning. It is equally important that future research challenge the implicit assumption
that conflict should be avoided or minimized in organizations. Rothman and Friedman (Ch. 26) lay the groundwork for such work by exploring different types of conflicts for which alternative responses are possible, and they indicate how under certain conditions, an active engagement of conflict can stimulate learning.