Knowledge-Intensive Organizations and Their Role in Promoting Sustainable Development

The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes an unprecedented challenge with very severe socio-economic consequences [...]

“Feeling in Control”: Optimal Busyness and the Temporality of Organizational Controls

This study extends prior research seeking to understand the reproduction and persistence of excessive busyness in professional settings by addressing the relationship between organizational controls and temporal experiences. Drawing on 146 interviews and more than 300 weekly diaries in two professional service firms, we develop a framework centered on the emerging concept of optimal busyness, an attractive, short-lived temporal experience that people try to reproduce/prolong because it makes them feel energized and productive as well as in control of their time. Our findings show that individuals continuously navigate between different temporal experiences separated by a fine line, quiet time, optimal busyness, and excessive busyness, and that optimal busyness that they strive for is a fragile and fleeting state difficult to achieve and maintain. We show that these temporal experiences are the effect of the temporality of controls—that is, the ability of controls to shape professionals’ temporal experience through structuring, rarefying, and synchronizing temporality. Moreover, we find that professionals who regularly face high temporal pressures seek to cope with these by attempting to construct/prolong optimal busyness through manipulating the pace, focus, and length of their temporal experiences, a process we call control of temporality. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the reproduction of busyness by explaining why professionals in their attempts to feel in control of their time routinely end up overworking.

An autoethnography of pregnancy and birth during Covid times: Transcending the illusio of overwork in academia?

Under the pressure of always increasing demands of publication, excessive working hours are widespread in academia. Based on an autoethnography of myself as a pregnant woman under Covid, I explore the extent of my being caught by the illusio–“being taken in and by the game” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), that prompted me to remain absorbed by the publishing game and to overwork until the very last day before giving birth to my son. I also explore how the forced deceleration induced by the maternity leave as well as the Covid confinement contributed to increased awareness and reflection thus helping me to transcend the illusio that prompted me to overwork. I also reflect to the extent of this conversion being reversible given the continued pressures of the academic context.

Impact of total quality management factors on knowledge creation in the organizations of Bangladesh

Purpose

Total quality management (TQM) and knowledge management (KM) are two similar and complementary management philosophies synergistic combinations that can form a cycle of improvement and development. This paper aims to investigate the impact of TQM factors on knowledge creation in the organizations of Bangladesh.

Design/methodology/approach

A list of TQM factors was identified through reviewing the relevant literature. Knowledge creation was analyzed through the framework proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). Data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire survey among 450 top and mid-level managers of the organizations. A quantitative research approach, namely, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used in the study. The data were analyzed in SmartPLS 3.

Findings

From the study, it is found that a positive and significant relationship exists between leadership, employee empowerment, benchmarking, customer focus and information technology with the knowledge creation process and four knowledge conversion modes. In contrast, a negative and significant relationship has been found between employee training and continuous improvement with the knowledge creation process and three knowledge conversion modes.

Research limitations/implications

Previous researches in Bangladesh empirically validated the effect of TQM on organizational performance, competitive advantage, financial performance, market performance and productivity. But, no such study was undertaken to empirically validate the effect of TQM on knowledge creation process for organizations of Bangladesh. Here, the study has a unique contribution. The empirical support for the hypotheses to explain and predict the contribution of the TQM in promoting knowledge creation.

Practical implications

The findings highlight the role of leadership practices. Organizational leadership needs to focus more on following issues: gathering required knowledge from the superior sources; transforming prevailing knowledge into a meaningful format to perform activities in better and innovative ways; employing opinions from experiences; facilitating mechanism for employees to update their knowledge; creating a virtual network; implementing customer relationship management system and providing tools and technologies to employees for performing KM activities more efficiently. On the other hand, negative effect of employee training and continuous improvement on knowledge creation sheds light on understanding the reasons for this kind of relationship and formulating effective strategies to resolve problems inside the organizations. In this regard, employees need to be well equipped through regular and appropriate training. Also, employees need to use problem-solving approach to identify problems inside the organizational system thereby availing opportunities for continuous improvement.

Originality/value

This study was conducted to identify factors that enable knowledge creation in organizations from developing countries like Bangladesh. TQM has been adopted in many organizations. But, its effect was mostly measured to determine its impact on improving organizational performance or competitiveness or identifying its critical success factors of implementation. Hence, this study sheds light on identifying the effect of TQM from a new perspective.

Project management in manufacturing enterprises

Current time of turbulent changes is related to the necessity of innovation, of both the products and the entire organization management system. However, innovation activities must be implemented in a short time. Unfortunately, most of the organizations struggle with insufficient costs and the lack of creative and active human resources. All of this might lead to a loss of market position and a decrease in competitiveness. If an organization wants to succeed on the market and survive in the long term, the trial and error method is ruled out. The project management is a possible way of dealing with the issue. Project management is characterized by a detailed examination of all the aspects of the project, their detailed planning, culminating in the implementation of the change and innovation. Therefore, the current managers need to define the precise goals, the responsible persons, and deadlines, allocate the tasks, costs and define the procedures crucial for project management clearly. Only in this way an organization is able to react to major changes quickly and without any mistakes. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the factors, important for the manufacturing enterprises in the projects, and to find out the relations of such factors. The research was carried out in 2019 in 116 manufacturing enterprises in the Czech Republic. The project managers often focus their attention on customer satisfaction and cost magnitude in evaluating of the projects.

Behavioral Visibility: A new paradigm for organization studies in the age of digitization, digitalization, and datafication

The digitization, digitalization, and datafication of work and communication, coupled with social and technical infrastructures that enable connectivity, are making it increasingly easy for the behaviors of people, collectives, and technological devices to see and be seen. Such digital connectivity gives rise to the important phenomenon of behavioral visibility. We argue that studying the antecedents, processes, and consequences of behavioral visibility should be a central concern for scholars of organizing. We attempt to set the cornerstones for the study of behavioral visibility by considering the social and technological contexts that are enabling behavioral visibility, developing the concept of behavioral visibility by defining its various components, considering the conditions through which it is commonly produced, and outlining potential consequences of behavioral visibility in the form of three paradoxes. We conclude with some conjectures about the kinds of research questions, empirical foci, and methodological strategies that scholars will need to embrace in order to understand how behavioral visibility shapes and is shaped by the process of organizing as we catapult, swiftly, into an era where artificial intelligence, learning algorithms, and social tools are changing the way people work.

Harnessing knowledge of building end-users: identifying knowledge brokers that matter

Purpose

This study aims to investigate projects as social exchange networks, focussing on identifying knowledge brokers within the project network where they are key holders and disseminators of end-user needs. The purpose is to augment current theory through a practice lens so that building end-user requirements can be better incorporated in evolving project ecosystems.

Design/methodology/approach

An interpretive, an inductive case study is used to map knowledge brokers during a complex construction and co-location project. During the wider study, a variety of methods including archival data, interviews and questionnaires along with social network analysis (SNA) were used. The mixed methodology used has been pivotal in the triangulation of data from various sources. However, the output of SNA presented in this paper relies mostly on interviews and questionnaires administered to the project’s core network. Network relationships were mapped with knowledge of user requirements, being the key determinant of the binary relationships between actors.

Findings

The research found certain roles to be central knowledge brokers of knowledge related to end-user processes, including real estate and strategic planning, building operations and management, human and environmental factors, planning and project management and facility and service delivery. The knowledge of the above roles, albeit in a contextually situated case study, augments current understanding of which roles to tap on during project execution for better representation of end-user needs.

Practical implications

The research site is representative of a complex network of construction project stakeholders, including several categories of end-users and their representatives. The study demonstrates the use of the project-as-practice approach, whereby project theory is seen to emerge directly from practice. This has impact on practice as emergent theory about knowledge transfer and knowledge brokerage is essentially practice-led and hence more useful and relate-able to practitioners.

Originality/value

Research presented here is novel in terms of its approach towards understanding end-user needs such as need for privacy, control, attachment and interaction during construction projects. This is done through the identification of relevant knowledge brokers. The study uses SNA as an analytical tool to map knowledge transfers through the project’s network. End-user requirements are usually captured in the front-end of projects as specifications and deliverables, as new challenges emerge during execution, changes are required to the project’s direction and outcomes. It is therefore imperative that end-user needs are re-identified through knowledge brokers holding key knowledge. This allows project managers to prepare appropriate responses to changing project ecosystems.

Erreichbarkeit gestalten, oder doch besser die Arbeit?

Zusammenfassung. Studien zur Erreichbarkeit für Arbeitsanforderungen zeigen, dass diese mit Arbeitszufriedenheit und Engagement (Motivation), aber auch Erholungsdefiziten in Beziehung steht, sowie mit höherer Arbeitsintensität und Tätigkeitsspielraum. Zu klären ist, ob die Beziehungen zwischen Erreichbarkeit und Motivation sowie Erholungsdefiziten auch nach Kontrolle der Effekte von Arbeitsmerkmalen nachweisbar sind. Es wurden Regressionsanalysen mit Daten von 83 erreichbar und 60 nicht erreichbar Beschäftigten durchgeführt (Prädiktoren: Arbeitsintensität, Tätigkeitsspielraum, Erreichbarkeit; Kriterien: Arbeitsengagement, Arbeitszufriedenheit, Erholungsunfähigkeit). Für Arbeitsengagement war allein der Tätigkeitsspielraum prädiktiv. Für Arbeitszufriedenheit und Erholungsunfähigkeit waren Arbeitsintensität, Tätigkeitsspielraum und Erreichbarkeit signifikante Prädiktoren. Dass durch Erreichbarkeit die Arbeit beendet werden kann, wird als möglicher Grund für die höhere Arbeitszufriedenheit diskutiert. Insgesamt scheinen erreichbar Beschäftigte ihre Arbeit nicht in der regulären Arbeitszeit zu schaffen. Sie nutzen den Tätigkeitsspielraum für die zeitliche Ausdehnung der Arbeit durch Erreichbarkeit. Dies verkürzt die Erholungszeiten, was sich in Erholungsunfähigkeit abbildet.

Managing organisational knowledge through recruitment: searching and selecting embodied competencies

Purpose

The creation of customized, technology-based services is highly dependent on experience-based knowledge embodied in individual expert employees. Therefore, knowledge upgrading through recruitment is fundamental to advanced services firms. Paying particular attention to the role of pre-existing knowledge bases and organisational contexts, this paper aims to investigate how software services firms search and select new employees. By doing so, it addresses an underdeveloped part of the human resource management (HRM) literature that concerns the relationship between recruitment and organisational learning.

Design/methodology/approach

The analysis uses qualitative data gathered through semi-structured interviews with HR managers and executives in 12 software firms located in the Norwegian capital, and supplementary information from technologists’ CVs. The firms are strategically chosen to support conceptual development and to allow theoretical generalizations that have relevance for practitioners, and for future research.

Findings

The findings point to a challenging tension associated with the need to create stable individual knowledge linkages internally in consultancy-based business environments where technologists tend to develop their careers through external labour market mobility.

Practical implications

Mangers should reflect upon the balance between external and internal competence investments. The creation of an organisational labour market represents one way of co-investing in integrative capabilities and thus of avoiding over-dependency on external sources of knowledge.

Originality/value

The study provides a conceptual model linking recruitment to organisational learning, and emphasises the importance of knowledge management functions at the intersection between external labour markets and the internal organisation.

Managerial Networks and Exploration in a Professional Service Firm

A firm’s growth and survival depends on the ability of its managers to explore for new business and knowledge; yet, exploration is challenging for most large, established firms. Extending prior research into networks and exploration, we propose that a key characteristic of managers’ external networks – the extent to which their networks include relationships built using predominately individual rather than firm resources – is positively related to managers’ abilities to explore for new business and knowledge in large firms. We propose that networks with more individual ties provide more diverse knowledge, enable greater autonomy and ease access to resources from contacts, hence facilitating exploration. Analysis of an original dataset of external networks of 77 senior managers in a large global consulting firm provides support for our arguments. We find that individual ties are positively related to exploration and, furthermore, that the positive (negative) relationship between sparse (dense) networks and exploration increases with the number of individual ties in managers’ networks.

The Significance of Distinctiveness: A Proposal for Rethinking Organizational Knowledge

In this article we attempt to provide some reorientation for the use of the concept of knowledge within management studies. The point of departure is the striking discrepancy between the great importance nowadays attributed to knowledge (knowledge economy, knowledge resources, knowledge societies, knowledge-intensive firms, etc.) on the one hand and the vague and blurring conceptualizations of knowledge on the other hand. Informed by philosophy of science a revised concept of knowledge is suggested that basically draws on communication and reflection. The core idea is that knowledge should be treated as a distinctive term which allows for a differentiation between knowledge and non-knowledge. The suggested concept therefore makes discursive examination a central part of the notion of knowledge. In the final part we attempt to demonstrate the possible benefi ts of such re-orientation by analysing both its theoretical and practical implications.

In and Between Societies: Reconnecting Comparative Institutionalism and Organization Theory

Recently, the state and future of organization theory have been widely debated. In this Perspectives issue, we aim to contribute to these debates by suggesting that organizational scholarship may benefit from greater understanding and consideration of societal institutions and their effects on the collective organizing of work. We also illustrate that the literature on comparative institutionalism, a strand of institutional thought with a rich tradition within Organization Studies, provides useful insights into these relations. We highlight several of these insights and briefly introduce the articles collected in the associated Perspectives issue of Organization Studies on comparative institutionalism1. We end with a call for greater cross-fertilization between comparative institutionalism and organization theory at large.

Productization of knowledge-intensive services

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to study the antecedents of service innovation success in the knowledge-intensive business services context, especially why the participation of frontline employees and multiple organizational units is not enough for succeeding in knowledge-intensive service productization.

Design/methodology/approach

– A multiple-case study of two polar cases with longitudinal data, participant observation, and key personnel interviews.

Findings

– Case evidence indicates that frontline employee participation and cross-unit collaboration are not sufficient antecedents for successful service productization. Instead, to facilitate employee knowledge sharing, managers need to align the project goals with the goals of participating employees, and promote trust among the project workgroup. Moreover, to enable effective cross-unit collaboration, managers need to facilitate the establishment of common vocabulary for productization work and services, and to resolve any emerging conflicts between participating organizational units.

Practical implications

– The findings indicate the importance of enabling knowledge sharing and cross-unit collaboration for service productization. The identified antecedents translate to practical strategies for achieving these. The results also highlight the importance of bottom-up service innovation, and the management of service innovation on the group level.

Originality/value

– The study indicates that common antecedents for successful service innovation may not be sufficient in the knowledge-intensive context, calling into question the assumptions about individual and group behavior in service innovation, and suggesting the importance of multi-level perspective on service innovation.

Intellectual capital and organizational ambidexterity in Chinese and Irish professional service firms

Purpose

– Organizational ambidexterity enables firm to simultaneously exploit existing resources and explore new resources. It is associated with high levels of organizational performance. The purpose of this paper is to identify key internal management resources which contribute to building organizational ambidexterity. In particular, this study examines the impact of intellectual capital, i.e. human, social, and organizational capital, on organizational ambidexterity which in turn influences firm performance.

Design/methodology/approach

– The research was conducted within the context of professional service firms due to the importance of intellectual capital and organizational ambidexterity. Data were collected from 112 Chinese (cross-sectional design) and 93 Irish accounting firms (time-lagged design).

Findings

– Results provide support for the linkage of intellectual capital to organizational ambidexterity and firm performance. Interestingly, findings are mixed regarding the impact of the three types of capital resources on organizational ambidexterity across both countries.

Practical implications

– This study finds that various components of intellectual capital facilitate organizational ambidexterity which in turn improves firm performance. Therefore the authors provide managers with evidential support for the salience of intellectual capital in enabling organizations to simultaneously engage in exploiting existing resources while also exploring new ideas and opportunities.

Originality/value

– This study is unique in that it highlights the importance of internal management resources in building up organization’s ambidexterity capability. The link between intellectual capital and organizational ambidexterity was established using a rigorous research design which has not been done before. It also emphasizes the role of people in leading to organizational effectiveness via developing organizational ambidexterity. Furthermore the evidence is gathered in two countries.

Relational Capital and Individual Exploration: Unravelling the Influence of Goal Alignment and Knowledge Acquisition

We investigate how the relational capital of a person within an organization affects the extent to which she or he conducts exploration activities. Our theory separates out a negative effect that comes from aligning goals with other organizational members from a positive effect that stems from acquiring knowledge from them. Our data from 150 members of the R&D teams of three leading R&D-intensive firms support the theoretical model. By developing and testing this theory, we contribute to the literature on exploration, which lacks understanding of the antecedents of individual exploration in organizations. We also contribute to relational capital literature, which has focused on organizational and group-level exploration, but which has shown inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between relational capital and exploration. A reason for this may be that this body of research has emphasized positive effects of relational capital for exploration only, and has not accounted for the different mechanisms that mediate the effects of relational capital on individual exploration activities. Our theory offers a more comprehensive view by explaining how relational capital may provide both benefits and liabilities to individual exploration activities.

Organizational Knowledge Creation in the Chinese Context

This paper elaborates theories of organizational knowledge creation by exploring the implications of institutional change for organizational knowledge creation in Chinese organizations of different ownership forms. Using a dynamic institutional perspective, we discuss prominent characteristics of the Chinese context and develop propositions about knowledge creation patterns in different organizational forms. We also theorize about the effects of increasing institutionalization on patterns of organizational knowledge creation in China and the consequent implications for innovation. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of this model and suggestions for further research.

Collective expertise: Ways of organizing expert work in collective settings

Two gaps appear in the theory of ‘expertise’: expert work as an individual endeavor; and, researchers and managers understanding little of expert practice. To bridge these gaps, ‘collective expertise’ can describe ways of organizing professional expert work in collective settings. This study analyzes ‘collective expertise’ in three Scandinavian cases using ethnographic methods: a product development process at Volvo; a description of computer programmers' work; and an analysis of nano physicists' organizing practices. The empirical results are used to build a ‘collective expertise’ theory, based on seven factors identified as contributing to collective expertise: concrete work routines, minimal structure, generosity and gift giving, narratives and story-telling, aesthetic capabilities, room for individuality, and mixed practice zone.

Do consultants in corporate governance share a community? An empirical study on their practice

We present an empirical study on the community of management consultants in the specialty of corporate governance. Although most studies on consulting are done on large multinational consulting firms, we suggest an alternative framework that encompasses the heterogeneity of the industry, considering also the smaller consulting firm and the independent consultant. We have qualitatively studied the practice of consultants specialized in corporate governance and looked for evidence of community belonging. Drawing on a Kuhnian theoretical framework and adapting his notion of knowledge creation to a governance consulting scenario, we explore community belonging, entry and exit mechanisms into the consulting community of governance, common culture and language, and regulation of the community. Findings confirm that consultants have mixed professional identities and an overlapping of memberships of various communities. Our results show that although no formal regulation or organization regulates corporate governance consulting, mechanisms such as reputation, career paths, experience and credibility work in strengthening the practice of the community.

Competence Regimes in Professional Service Firm Internationalization and Professional Careers

Professional service firms (PSFs) are dependent on the competence of their employees to develop and retain new business. We investigate how PSFs utilize professional competence for strategic goals such as business internationalization and simultaneously facilitate professionals’ career mobility. We examine over a 5-year period the careers of 29 lawyers working in a large corporate law firm and identify four different competence regimes: technicians, project managers, competitive analysts, and global strategists. We argue that these competence regimes enable PSFs to pursue organizational business strategies while advancing or constraining or even undermining professional employees’ career goals and aspirations. Specifically, we show how the four competence regimes facilitate the PSF’s strategy to internationalize its business and support high performing employees’ social mobility goals to develop their professional competence and advance their career. We then give suggestions for future research studies on competence regimes in professional organizations.

Room for Action? How Service Managers in Three Scandinavian Cities Experience their Possibilities to Develop their Services

Background

The study is based on the ongoing public debate concerning a limited scope for local service development in alcohol and drug treatment-related services - and that the main cause of local “paralysis” is to be found in health policy micromanagement of these services. It is argued that business management models place too much emphasis on financial control and performance measurement and that this leads to less interest in quality improvement in the provision of services.

Design

23 interviews with service managers in three Nordic urban municipalities, Stavanger, Umeå and Aarhus.

Results

The article documents comprehensive local service development, demonstrating that the main conditions for innovation are management commitment and interdisciplinary co-operation in the practice field.

Conclusions

In all three municipalities the services develop in a hybrid innovation model that combines New Public Management-inspired solutions with technical co-operation in horizontal networks. Results show that NPM-inspired solutions to alcohol and drug treatment services do not necessarily hinder the consideration of local professionalism and flexibility in the development.

Knowledge Appropriation and Identity: Toward a Multi-Discourse Analysis

Knowledge appropriation has been underpinned by an assumption of the organization’s ‘entitlement’ to appropriate knowledge and the outcomes of its utilization. Given the complexity of knowledge and the potentially conflicting views held about it, this assumption is revealed to be theoretically imprecise in the way it marginalizes alternative voices through the pursuit of competitive advantage and ‘value capture’. We attribute this approach to the functionalist analytical lens which sees knowledge as an asset appropriable almost exclusively by the organization in the form of financial/economic ‘rents’. In order to advance understanding of the multi-faceted nature of the organization-individual appropriation regime, we make the case for an expansion of the discursive space for talking about the phenomenon, and posit the concept of ‘property in knowledge’ which we tie to the way individuals construct their identities.

Constraint-Shattering Practices and Creative Action in Organizations

This study contributes insights on how actors cope with constraints in ill-structured problem-solving situations, and what implications this coping has for creative action. To date, most research on constraint handling has treated constraints, regardless of their nature, origin, or role, as external factors that enable or hinder creativity. In contrast, we consider constraints to be inextricably intertwined with all creative action. We focus our study on one specific practice for constraint handling: namely, shattering. Empirical data were collected for 12 projects in two engineering consulting firms, and four shattering practices were identified: protesting, proposing, betraying, and sabotaging. We discuss their enactment in various parts of the problem space and their implications for the management of creative action in organizations.

Elite identity and status anxiety: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of management consultants

Critical management scholars have emphasized that organizations’ attempts to regulate employees’ identities can prompt the reproduction or transformation of self-identity. The emotional consequences of identity regulation, however, remain largely unexamined. This article explores the experiences of eight management consultants in the British office of a global consulting firm over several months. Interviews and observations were analysed according to the principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis. The results of the study highlight consultants’ identification with an organizationally inspired elite discourse alongside high levels of commitment and the presence of a counter-intuitive yet significant status anxiety. Drawing on psychological and sociological theories that connect identity and anxiety, this article suggests that the continual promotion of an elite identity within the consulting firm leaves many of the consultants feeling acutely anxious about their status.

Effect of Workforce Age on Quantitative and Qualitative Organizational Performance: Conceptual Framework and Case Study Evidence

Field studies linking workforce age to performance treat performance as one-dimensional and often focus on individual not organizational performance. To analyze the effects of workforce age on organizational performance, we suggest treating performance as multi-dimensional with at least two output dimensions: quantity and quality. We provide a novel conceptual framework that borrows insights from multiple disciplines to better understand ageing phenomena in organizations. In particular, we build on psychological and medical studies showing that individual age has different effects on different cognitive capabilities. As a result, we argue that workforce ageing may affect various performance dimensions, such as quantity and quality, in different, often opposite ways. In our empirical part we examine a unique dataset containing detailed court data over a time span of 19 years. We find that average workforce age is linked negatively to quantitative organizational performance but positively to qualitative organizational performance. Our findings suggest that future organizational studies should decompose performance at least along the quantity–quality dimension. Our theoretical framework helps to understand the different types of ageing effects and to derive itemized implications for changes in organizational performance. It also helps to reconcile contradictory findings of previous studies and to derive important managerial implications for task assignments, career policies and company strategies in view of upcoming demographic changes in many developed countries.

Controls of Knowledge Production, Sharing and Use in Bureaucratized Professional Service Firms

One of the main obstacles to the current bureaucratization trend in large professional service firms (PSFs) is the organic nature of professional knowledge production, sharing and use. Centralized knowledge management (KM) systems aimed at codifying ‘best practice’ solutions to recurrent client questions for large-scale reuse are a common strategy increasingly employed to overcome this obstacle. Using a socio-ethnographic case study of a business law firm in Paris, this research examines whether the use of centralized KM systems in bureaucratized PSFs contributes to a shift in power from professionals to managers. More specifically, are administrative controls over knowledge resources increasing, or do professionals retain power (i.e. some level of social and self-control) over knowledge production, sharing and use? The results of this study indicate that, far from losing ground, professionals’ social and self-controls have been reinvented and reformed in a bureaucratized context.

Organisational design elements and competencies for optimising the expertise of knowledge workers in a shared services centre

Orientation: Organisations are still structured according to the Industrial Age control model that restricts optimising the expertise of knowledge workers.Research purpose: The general aim of the research was to explore the organisation design elements and competencies that contribute to optimising the expertise of knowledge workers in a shared services centre.Motivation for the study: Current organisational design methodologies do not emphasise optimising the expertise of knowledge workers. This research addresses the challenge of how an organisation design can improve the creation and availability of the expertise of knowledge workers.Research design/approach method: The researcher followed a qualitative case study research design and collected data in six focus group sessions (N = 25).Main findings: The findings showed that the shared services centre (SSC) is not designed to enable its structure, culture and codifying system to optimise the expertise of knowledge workers. In addition, the SSC does not share the knowledge generated with other knowledge workers. Furthermore, it does not use the output of the knowledge workers to improve business processes.Practical/managerial implications: The expertise of knowledge workers is the basis of competitive advantage. Therefore, managers should create an organisational design that is conducive to optimising knowledge work expertise.Contribution/value add: This research highlights the important organisational design elements and supportive organisational structures for optimising the expertise of knowledge workers. The research also proposes a framework for optimising the expertise of knowledge workers and helping an organisation to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

Inter-epistemic Power and Transforming Knowledge Objects in a Biomedical Network

We examine a multidisciplinary network established to translate genetics science into practice in the British NHS. Drawing on theory about epistemic communities and objects, we describe three stages in their lifecycle (vision/formation, transformation and reincarnation) and epistemic clashes over knowledge objects. Medical academics captured jurisdiction over the network at formation, through their superior knowledge of the nascent genetics discipline, producing epistemic objects reflecting their interests. A governmental community challenged medical academics for jurisdiction but, unable to transform objects by changing their space of representation in performance reporting, ceased funding the network, which then closed. Afterwards, however, a NHS community successfully ‘reincarnated’ a discarded epistemic object into a technical object in NHS practice. We make a theoretical contribution by developing a processual framework for understanding biomedical innovation, focusing on transforming objects situated between different wider knowledge/power structures. This explains how objects were transformed at micro-level through the interaction and relative power of local communities, influenced by macro-level rules about knowledge formation in wider epistemic, organizational and governmental communities.

Professional knowledge creation in the hospital sector: a qualitative study in Taiwan

This paper aims to develop a professional knowledge creation model for the hospital sector. For this purpose, we qualitatively explore the determinants and process of knowledge creation in the hospital sector. Drawing from organization theory, we develop a hospital's professional knowledge creation model and develop three propositions first. We further explore the theoretical model at organization level by case study in Taiwan. The findings suggest that the hospital's professional knowledge creation is influenced by knowledge stock, social ties and isomorphic pressures as propositions argued. However, hospitals' attempts to keep aligned with their highly institutionalized environments may pay more attention to both existing knowledge stock and the process of professional knowledge creation for their survival. Finally, it is hoped that the significances of this study will contribute to the development of hypotheses in the future quantitative study for building a generalized knowledge creation model for the hospital organization.

Do consultants in corporate governance share a community? An empirical study on their practice

We present an empirical study on the community of management consultants in the specialty of corporate governance. Although most studies on consulting are done on large multinational consulting firms, we suggest an alternative framework that encompasses the heterogeneity of the industry, considering also the smaller consulting firm and the independent consultant. We have qualitatively studied the practice of consultants specialized in corporate governance and looked for evidence of community belonging. Drawing on a Kuhnian theoretical framework and adapting his notion of knowledge creation to a governance consulting scenario, we explore community belonging, entry and exit mechanisms into the consulting community of governance, common culture and language, and regulation of the community. Findings confirm that consultants have mixed professional identities and an overlapping of memberships of various communities. Our results show that although no formal regulation or organization regulates corporate governance consulting, mechanisms such as reputation, career paths, experience and credibility work in strengthening the practice of the community.