Concepts of organizational learning abound in the literature. There has been an increasing diversity of attempts at classification, but an integrated theory is still missing. To provide some tentative answers as to why theory development in organizational learning has made such little progress, a number of requirements for theory-building will be formulated, and the current theoretical stance of some approaches of organizational learning will be analyzed. It will be argued, that most research in organizational learning is confronted with the quest for "usefulness" which is inherently detrimental to "theory-building" in the traditional sense. In contrast, focusing on "practicality" in organizational learning research, and purporting the critical use of metaphors and/or analogies may be more adequate for the theoretical development of the field. Interpreting the non-cumulative body of research as a priori intended and "normal" may be further helpful to (re-)define one of the most realistic futures of the concept of organizational learning