Knowledge, Knowledge Work and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation

Abstract

There is current interest in the competitive advantage that knowledge may provide for organizations and in the significance of knowledge workers, organ izational competencies and knowledge-intensive firms. Yet the concept of knowledge is complex and its relevance to organization theory has been insuf ficiently developed. The paper offers a review and critique of current approaches, and outlines an alternative. First, common images of knowledge in the organizational literature as embodied, embedded, embrained, encultured and encoded are identified and, to summarize popular writings on knowledge work, a typology of organizations and knowledge types is constructed. How ever, traditional assumptions about knowledge, upon which most current speculation about organizational knowledge is based, offer a compartmental ized and static approach to the subject. Drawing from recent studies of the impact of new technologies and from debates in philosophy, linguistics, social theory and cognitive science, the second part of the paper introduces an altern ative. Knowledge (or, more appropriately, knowing) is analyzed as an active process that is mediated, situated, provisional, pragmatic and contested. Rather than documenting the types of knowledge that capitalism currently demands the approach suggests that attention should be focused on the (culturally located) systems through which people achieve their knowing, on the changes that are occurring within such systems, and on the processes through which new knowledge may be generated.