Innovation, Knowledge and Power in Organizations

Theodora Asimakou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134091591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book examines discourses of knowledge and innovation in post-industrial societies and knowledge-based organizations. The author investigates the value of knowledge and the question of innovation management in a fully commercial environment for a technology company.

In contrast with most of the mainstream approaches to knowledge and innovation management this volume chooses as its starting point a critical examination of these assumptions before proceeding with further suggestions on how to manage knowledge. Using brand new empirical research, the author argues for the significance of addressing the political games and power struggles enacted in managing innovation processes, which result from the opportunity certain groups seek to acquire or extend their control over valuable resources. Again, in contrast to mainstream approaches that reduce power to the ability of individuals to negotiate in order to promote their ideas, the analysis adopts an extended view on power, and seeks to reveal the ambiguities and challenges of innovation management.

This work will be of most interest to researchers and students of knowledge and innovation management, namely postgraduates and second degree students, as well as managers in knowledge-based organisations.

1
Introduction

A story of studying technological innovation

Introduction

It may be stating the obvious to say that knowledge is the key resource in today’s post-industrial society; a powerful discourse has been construed in the latest years, which relates the sustainability and the success of businesses to their capacity to compete on the edge of new and rare knowledge, either in the form of new products and services, or businesses, etc. This discourse has a great impact on the structural properties of society and organizations; the latter, following the prescriptions of knowledge rhetoric, have joined the pursuit of identifying their knowledge capital and supporting the processes of new knowledge generation and innovation, which are expected ultimately to return the competitive advantage. Hence, a new type of organization has emerged: the knowledge-based organization; its main feature is that the production processes are not defined by capital or labour, but knowledge. Knowledge becomes the input and the output of the production process, and its quest intensifies.

Clearly, the new discourse on the value of knowledge and innovation has created the need for understanding and managing the related processes; the field of knowledge and innovation management has been approached and studied from many different disciplines and perspectives (Economics, Finance, Organization Behaviour, Information Science), which predominantly conclude the studies by developing technologies and tools to support these processes. Innovation is framed within these approaches in terms of a ‘hardcore’ technical language, which asserts the ‘performativity’, the ‘cost’ and the ‘economic benefits’ of investing in innovations. Others take a more critical stance and suggest trying and understanding the properties of the phenomenon before we reach the stage for recommendations. A phenomenon that gains increasingly great force and, considering the structural transformations it has caused, has already proved that it is not another ‘management fashion’, needs be studied carefully and from multiple standpoints.

This second stream in studying innovation has formed conceptually this piece of research. The project takes a step back and studies the nature of discourse on knowledge and innovation, and its consequences for knowledge-based organizations. In particular, it questions whether innovation, defined not as product development, for this type of innovation cannot secure the sustainability of the business in the future, but as long-term and uncertain programmes, can be supported in a fully commercial environment, and, if yes, what strategies and processes are enacted to conciliate the inconsistencies that exist in the fundamental assumptions of these discourses. The argument is that knowledge and innovation have been first articulated within a different language game, therefore their translation into the language game of cost-control and profitability would meet resistance and lead to the reordering of power relations, and ultimately to the redefinition of the rules of either (or both) language game. In other words, the study adds the power factor to the analysis of innovation, a factor that mainstream approaches frequently either neglect or take a limited view on power, which reduces politics to the power of negotiation and the social networks of individuals.

The empirical part of the study was conducted in a technology-based organization (which I call Hydro-Carbon Solutions), because the most appropriate site to conduct the research would be an organization where knowledge is the main resource for the business operations, and where the creation of new knowledge would be a primary concern for the organization. The rationale behind this is that in such an organization I would be able to study (a) at the macro level, the grand discourse on innovation, i.e. the discourse that allegedly guides organizational actions, and (b) at the same time, at the organizational level, the discourses on innovation that each organization constructs, according to its own history and understanding of what they should do, and other conflicting discourses that could possibly impede innovation to become the ‘one’ accepted reality. The interesting feature with these companies is that they employ a large number of ‘hard’ scientists, most of them being qualified researchers at a PhD level, who often have worked (or some of them currently have) a position in the academia, and now they are employed in an organization with commercial ends. I thought that this point would throw light on the question of knowledge from various aspects, since it would enable me to study the re-articulations within the dominant innovation discourse, as it converges to embracing a commercial rationale, and the collision between competing discourses on innovation that emerge at the limits of the commercial discourse, as well as the effects on knowledge subjects and structures – i.e. the scientists, the innovation processes, etc.

Having adopted a critical position to the study of organization, the objective of the book is not to nullify rationalistic approaches on the grounds of being inadequate to study innovation; on the contrary, it asserts the opening up of the debate, for knowledge and innovation are multidimensional phenomena and need be studied from multiple perspectives; by challenging the established frame of thinking regarding management and organizational phenomena the book aspires to provoke debate and new ways of tackling management issues related to knowledge and innovation. The contribution of the book is that, by applying critical discourse analysis, i.e. an off-the-mainstream methodology for organizational studies, in the study of knowledge processes, it gains insights into the changing nature of knowledge and innovation, investigates the consequent reordering of the power relations and theorizes the consequences for the knowledge subjects and structures; in other words, the book suggests the analysis of power in the study of innovation processes by listening to the voices of various partakers.

Discourse and organizational studies

Discourse theory has been developed as a response to amend the perceived weaknesses of conventional qualitative research.¹It rejects realism, suggesting instead a social constructionist view of the world, formulated by Wittgenstein’s writings on language and Marxist concepts on politics and ideology; at the same time, it does not reject the interpretative models of social research, as inspired by Weber and others. Grounded in a post-structuralist epistemology and its critique on language, discourse theory opened up new ways of thinking about the relationship between structure and agency, identities and social actions, the interweaving of meanings and practices, and the nature of social and historical change.

For discourse theory all objects and actions are meaningful, and this meaning is conferred by historical specific systems of rules. Following Foucault, the meaning depends on the orders of discourse that constitute its identity and significance (Foucault, 1971, 1972); that I perceive a tree as decoration, or as first resource for economic expansion, or as an obstacle, depends upon the discourse – aesthetics, economic rationality or personal interest – from within I operate.

Howarth and Stavrakakis (2000:3–4) describe the nature of discourse as follows:

we take discourse or discourses to refer to systems of meaningful practices that form the identities of subjects and objects. At this lower level of abstraction, discourses are concrete systems of social relations and practices that are intrinsically political, as their formation is an act of radical institution, which involves the construction of antagonisms and the drawing of political frontiers between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. In addition, therefore, they always involve the exercise of power, as their constitution involves the exclusion of certain possibilities and a consequent structuring of the relations between different social agents. Moreover, discourses are contingent and historical constructions, which are always vulnerable to those political forces excluded in their production, as well as the dislocatory effects of events beyond their control.

This description encapsulates traces of the approaches (structuralism, Foucauldian, etc.) that have contributed in shaping the shared understanding of discourse in social interactions. Indeed, the study of discourse is being conducted from different perspectives (interpretative, critical, post-structuralist) and one can notice some variations as to what is treated as ‘discourse’. Structural linguistics defines discourse as ‘language above the sentence or the clause’, whereas functional approaches define discourse as ‘language in use’ (Schiffrin, 1994). Foucault, on the other hand, having adopted a more abstract approach to discourse analysis, treats discourse as a set of statements that formulate objects and subjects.²

Despite these differences, there are some fundamental assumptions about language that various approaches to the study of discourse treat as common ground (Potter and Wetherell, 1987:35):

• language is used for a variety of functions and its use has a variety of consequences

• language is both constructed and constructive

• the same phenomenon can be described in a number of ways

• there will, therefore, be considerable variations in accounts

• there is, as yet, no foolproof way to deal with this variation and to shift accounts which are ‘literal’ or ‘accurate’ from those which are rhetorical or merely misguided thereby escaping the problems variation raises for researchers with a ‘realistic’ model of language

• the constructive and flexible ways in which language is used should themselves become a central topic of study.

Discourse analysis draws attention to three key aspects of language: contradiction, construction and practice (Parker and BDN, 1999). ‘Contradiction’ searches for different meanings that are at work in the text; contradictions between different significations and contradictions between different versions of the world. This does not mean that consistencies cannot be a topic of study; patterns and repetitions are interesting as well, but they do not take upon the role of ‘normal’ uncritically. ‘Construction’ refers to the examination of how meanings have been socially constructed in a way to make sense as normal or natural to the reader. Last, ‘practice’ questions what these contradictory systems of meanings are doing; how they naturalize the people’s understanding of what ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ is, and the consequences of this naturalization on how people understand the world and act. Issues of power and ideology may be called into play, as discourse is investigated in terms of its political function.

The linguistic turn towards the study of discourse in social sciences has intrigued the attention of much research in organization studies. Consequent of the vague understanding and agreement as to what ‘discourse’ refers to, the research that has been conducted from this approach, covers various areas and aspects of the organizational life. Keenoy et al. (1997), attempting to conceptualize the related work done on the field, distinguish two main streams: the first one is between authors that see discourse analysis as a methodological device for making linguistic sense of organizations and organizational phenomena; these authors focus on the study of social text, which includes the study of talk and written text in its social action contexts and highlights the ‘talked’ and ‘textual’ nature of everyday interaction in organization (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000).

The second, in contrast, sees the study of discourse as a means for revealing the ambiguities of social construction and the indeterminacy of organizational experiences. From this viewpoint, social reality is discursively constructed and maintained, and analysis focuses on its determination through historically situated discursive moves. This approach introduces and studies the social and political dimensions of language, in addition to the discursive, compared to the more narrow-focused textual approaches. These latter studies have been greatly formed in the ground of a Foucauldian approach to the study of discourse (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000).

Methodology – critical discourse analysis

The research adopts a language-centred view on studying innovation. From this perspective, discourse, i.e. a web of relations among elements, which provides the conditions of emergence of any meaningful object, rather than action or meaning, is the object of study. Following Van Leewen (in Wodak and Meyer, 2001) I looked at discourse both as a social practice and as a form of knowledge that shapes realities; I examined innovation, as articulated by various groups and within different webs of relationships, and then contrasted it with the normative discourse of innovation, as found in the academic literature, which supposedly shapes organizational actions. The assumptions behind this approach is that discourse is a mode of action, in other words, a way of people interacting with each other and the world, as well as a mode of representation – a representation not of the world, but of the humans’ perceptions of the world.

‘Social practice’ implies that language is neither a social product nor an entity independent of the society. Language is a part of the societal whole. There is a dialectical interaction between discourse and social structures – similar to the relationship between social practices and social structures; discourse is construed by the social structure, interest groups, institutions, etc., in other words, the social orders that shape orders of discourse. Discourse is not only shaped but also impacts and shapes social structure and orders, giving the world meaning. Actual/local discourse is determined by socially constituted orders of discourse, and sets of conventions associated with social institutions (Fairclough, 1989). I should note here that this point recognizes a degree of freedom to individuals to choose from existing discourses, according to the specific situation and their objectives each time.

Fairclough (1992) distinguishes three aspects of the constructive effects of discourse: (a) discourse constructs ‘social identities’ and the self; (b) discourse constructs social relationships among people and (c) discourse contributes to the construction of knowledge and beliefs. These three functions of discourse form the keystone of the analytical framework. From the nature and functions of discourse, it follows that not only a change in social orders is represented in a change of discourse, but also a change in discourse transforms identities, relationships and systems of knowledge.

Change occurs when the contested discourse – as any discourse – reaches its limits when it encounters events that cannot be explained within the current discursive system, and hence is being redefined by re-articulating the relations among its elements. Laclau and Mouffe (2001) call this failure of discourse to domesticate new events ‘dislocation’, and assert that it leads to a partial breakdown of the symbolic order. The limits of a discourse change, as it now may include new elements, lose others and rearrange their web of relations. In this process, new meanings and practices emerge, while the identities and relations of the subjects participating in this struggle are bein...

Table of contents

• Routledge studies in global competition
• Contents
• Illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Theoretical
• Part II Empirical
• Appendix Sources of information
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index