Communication and Organizational Knowledge

Contemporary Issues for Theory and Practice

Heather E. Canary, Robert D. McPhee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135221423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

This book provides an overview of communication-centered theory and research regarding organizational knowledge and learning. It brings the work of scholars in communication, management, information technology, and other disciplines together in a coherent volume that represents existing research and theory on communication-related knowledge work. Chapters address what constitutes knowledge, how knowledge functions within and across organizations, and how organizational members develop and manage knowledge for organizational purposes. The book also provides a forum for these scholars to pose directions for future research and theorizing. It will serve as a reference tool for scholars and practitioners to identify and understand communicative features of organizational knowledge processes.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Toward a Communicative Perspective on Organizational Knowledge

Heather E. Canary and Robert D. McPhee

A primary reason people choose to organize is to achieve a common purpose with knowledge and abilities of multiple people. Accordingly, interests in who knows what, how they know it, and what they do with it are as old as the phenomenon of organizing. This volume attests to the complexities involved in understanding organizational knowledge, and to the many ways organizational knowledge is conceptualized. The book brings together several approaches to organizational knowledge, and many important issues scholars and practitioners grapple with as organizational members adapt to contemporary exigencies. The unifying element throughout this book is a focus on the communicative nature of organizational knowledge. That is, contributors to this volume address in varying manners how organizational knowledge is developed, manifested, managed, and/or utilized through communication. Organizational knowledge researchers and theorists have not consistently considered the interactive elements of knowledge, although much empirical research in the area “points to” communication (Bartel & Garud, 2003; Hayes & Walsham, 2003).

Accordingly, this volume is devoted to explicating communicative perspectives of organizational knowledge. In this introduction, we discuss theoretical foundations of organizational knowledge research and articulate connections among the chapters included in the book. We start by reviewing major scholarly movements in the emergence of organizational knowledge as background for theory and research. This historical review is followed by a discussion of current perspectives on the topic as a vehicle for introducing the work that this volume comprises. Third, we discuss a general theoretical template that is used throughout the book for delineating knowledge processes. Finally, we discuss the four sections of this volume as they represent four problem fields emergent in the organizational knowledge literature.

Emergence of a Focus on Organizational Knowledge

Because scholarly attention to organizational knowledge is a fairly recent phenomenon, we use this section to briefly summarize major movements in organizational theory and practice which have led to the current focus on organizational knowledge. Importantly, although the term organizational knowledge has only been commonly used within the past couple of decades, interest in the phenomenon of organizational knowledge has been emerging since the early days of organizational theorizing.

Bureaucracy and Scientific Management

Collection of information about production is one of the oldest practices in human history, a contributor to development of such phenomena as writing, agrarian society, empires and cities, and pre-modern as well as modern patterns of commerce (Giddens, 1981). However, real recognition of knowledge use in organizing appeared early in the 20th century. One of the fundamental principles of bureaucratic organizing is division of labor based on expertise (Perrow, 1986). However, early efforts at bureaucratization were much less focused on member knowledge than on such concepts as standardization and efficiency (Perrow, 1986). Early Weberian bureaucratic emphases included setting up systems for file processing, determining qualifications for job assignments, and prioritizing rationality in organizations. All of these endeavors revolve around the notion of organizational knowledge, although that term was not referenced or highlighted in early bureaucratic movements of organizational studies. As Perrow noted, the bureaucratic movement encouraged organizational leaders to abandon nepotism and other forms of particularism for the more rational concepts of systematization, specialization, and expertise. In the contemporary lexicon, developing divisions of labor and hierarchies based on expertise and specialization was the first movement for harnessing and prioritizing organizational knowledge. Before the bureaucratic movement, knowledge and ability counted much less than did reputation and loyalty (Perrow, 1986).

An alternate path toward knowledge manipulation to serve organizational control was the scientific management movement, which emphasized the division of tasks so specialized knowledge was not needed and so production could be performed by multiple employees who had little knowledge of the overall product. Accordingly, overall knowledge of the process and product was seen as extracted by studying workers executing tasks, then developed and administered by a staff of “scientific managers” (e.g., a factory works best when industrial engineers conceive and design it). Taylorism valorized internal study of organizations to optimize productivity. Of course, hindsight provides a clear view of the downside of this deskilling of production – lack of worker motivation and commitment, under-utilization of worker creative abilities, and the dehumanization of work organizations. Hence, scientific management, as a way of viewing organizational processes, played a significant role in the emergence of a focus on organizational knowledge as opposed to individual knowledge and one-way knowledge processes.

Human Resources

The dehumanization of work organizations inevitably led to a backlash which has become known, using the term broadly, as the human resources movement. As Wheatley (2000) recently noted, knowledge is human knowledge, so employees are best treated as having useful knowledge. With a more educated workforce, and greater emphasis on service industries and white-collar jobs, theorists and managers began to place more emphasis on flatter structures, participative decision-making, group norms, job redesign, intrinsic motivation, and open communication. Structural contingency theory articulated a difference between routine jobs and a class of jobs or departments that confronted high uncertainty, using expertise and information collection. The interpretive notion of organizational culture did include informal practices and norms, but it also recognized stocks of knowledge, employee creativity, the tacit dimension of knowledge, and organizational memory. Although many human resource management ideas were more relevant to motivation, the varied notions of organizational learning, increased employee responsibility, and cultural knowledge naturally led to more reliance on looser management, socialization, expertise, and group cooperation to make room for employee contributions. And all of these are early concepts whose interrelatedness is part of the concept of organizational knowledge.

The Recent Sources of Knowledge Studies

Taking an historical look at the development of organizational knowledge as a focus of theory and research brings into sharp relief how different conceptualizations of knowledge drive the diverse streams of literature on the topic. Scholars of organizational knowledge have, for one thing, studied a variety of processes of development and storage of knowledge. For instance, cognitive psychologists, but arguably also the whole range of disciplines, have studied:

(a) schema theory and related conceptions of mental representations (especially the notion of mental models), (b) behavioral decision theory (especially work on heuristics and biases), (c) attribution theory, (d) social identity theory and related conceptions, and (e) enactment and the related notion of sensemaking [These can be more broadly grouped as] computational and interpretive perspectives on cognition in organizations.

(Hodgkinson & Healey, 2008, p. 391)

Obviously, some of these individual-level foci inherently depend on social/ communicative groups engaged in processes of “making available and amplifying knowledge created by individuals as well as crystallizing and connecting it to an organization’s knowledge system” (Nonaka & Von Krogh, 2009, p. 635). Here, an increasingly focal concept is that of “practice.” Theorists of practice emphasize the grounding of explicitly stated, and/or technologically manifested or stored and distributed, knowledge on a background of tacit and socially grounded knowledge, which is always in complicated relation to the first type. A broad range of theorists and researchers have been exploring the question of how such arrays of knowledge can be organizational (Tsoukas, 2005). Throughout this volume, we explore the ways such organizational knowledge is also, in essence, communicative.

A sense of the importance of groups and social interaction implies a related conception of knowledge as emergent and maintained in nets of connections. Social/communicative studies of knowledge processes contextualized in networks have ranged from information flow in webs of relations among specific persons, to studies of network patterns that generate social and intellectual capital, to studies that describe the nets of work-related knowledge in global commodities markets as flows so unstable that they constantly recreate transient networks (Carlile, 2004; Knorr-Cetina & Prada, 2007; Monge & Contractor, 2003; Stewart, 2003).

Connections, though, are partly but increasingly dependent on communication technologies. Emphasis on innovation and constant change, on the especially dynamic domain of communication technology, and on communication networks and inter-organizational coordination led to a focus on technology-grounded knowledge sharing and “informating” even in factory jobs (Zuboff, 1985). The notions of quality control, particularly in Japanese corporations, and of high reliability organizations involved increasing employees’ control and knowledge of the whole organization. Organizational knowledge research has examined the technology-dependent capacity to gather or receive knowledge, to store it, to translate or transform it, and to use it, in organizational situations imposing a variety of constraints and opportunities (Baskerville & Myers, 2002; Bhatt, 2001; Carlile, 2004). Of course, technological effects are two-way, with technology and its effects transfigured by social processes. And of course, “gathering” usually includes reflexive surveillance that is technologically grounded, and there is a constant temptation to see knowledge as reified, as being the technology (Trethewey & Corman, 2001).

Finally, organizational knowledge process research has increasingly recognized the importance of context. Organizations in different industries, in different markets, in different national or ethnic cultures, with different levels of capital, have different technological resources, and appropriate them differently. The sheer number of academic journals devoted to knowledge management and knowledge processes is evidence of the importance placed on knowledge processes across contexts and disciplines. A recent issue of the Journal of Knowledge Management ranked the top 20 knowledge management journals, many of which are devoted to specific organizational contexts (Serenko & Bontis, 2009, p. 11). Additionally, several typologies of organizational knowledge have been proposed in recent scholarly literature, with scholars recognizing that different types of knowledge are used and valued in different contexts (Lam, 2000). We will not elaborate here on these typologies, because Heather Canary addresses knowledge typologies in Chapter 14. It is clear from the volume of research generated in recent years across disciplines and contexts that organizational knowledge remains an important phenomenon to understand, and that increasing that understanding requires recognition of a complex interplay of processes.

A Theoretical Template

Evident in the literature is a sense of the variety of ways communication is part of the complex web of organizational knowledge processes. Due to the broad range of approaches and issues represented in organizational knowledge research, we thought it productive to use a theoretical template to describe issues in this book. We found a useful beginning in Glaser’s (1978) model of the “six Cs,” which included context, condition, cause, covariance, contingent, and consequence as they relate to some object, “A.” Glaser presented the six Cs as a way of conceptualizing coding families and variables/constructs, which can be used to develop grounded theory. However, it is also valuable in clarifying the relations among variables or constructs in many types of theories. Such relations sometimes are unclear or have a mixed identity in theoretical writing and research application. Also, the model is a stimulus to innovative questions and new developments, as scholars consider the types of additional concepts they could add to their own ...

Table of contents

• COMMUNICATION SERIES
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I The Communicative Practices of Organizational Knowledge
• Part II The Communicative Connections of Organizational Knowledge
• Part III The Communicative Technologies of Organizational Knowledge
• Part IV The Communicative Contexts of Organizational Knowledge
• Index