Exploring the Role of the Project Manager in Organizational Knowledge Creation

This article explores and shows how a Project Manager interacts with the project team to facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge within project environment. Three types of data were collected from one pharmaceutical company. This article contributes to the current Knowledge Management literature by proposing a new structure for the knowledge creation process, an infinite loop enabling multiple paths rather than a single linear path process. The authors discuss practical implications as well as avenues for the future research.

The Processes of Project-based Learning

This paper explores the implications of an increasing reliance on project forms for learning within organizations. In particular, we focus on the tensions between learning at project level and the stocks and flows of organizational knowledge. Based on a review of the existing literature, we outline propositions on two major processes of project-based learning (PBL): ‘learning-by-absorption’ and ‘learning-by-reflection’. Subsequently, the paper applies and refines this framework through the analysis of the findings from a qualitative study of three linked projects in the UK water industry. The findings from our study support and highlight the role of the above-noted processes in determining the extent and transfer of PBL. In particular, they indicate the role played by ‘quasi-organizational’ forms in enabling ‘learning-by-absorption’ and ‘learning-by-reflection’ at a project level. But equally, they help to explain limitations on the ability of project-based learning to bring about significant changes in knowledge stocks and flows in the wider organization.

Managing Knowledge in Organization Studies Through Instrumentation

This article advocates a program of standard instrumentation in organization studies to improve the way knowledge is managed in the discipline. The construct ‘knowledge management’ is discussed, and the role of this construct in the theory of the firm is briefly reviewed. Then two problems of knowledge management in organization studies are identified—construct de-objectification and the difficulty of cumulating knowledge across empirical studies. The role of instrumentation in natural science is described, and it is argued that standard instrumentation in natural science helps moderate the problems of construct de-objectification and barriers to cross-study accumulation of knowledge. The possibility of implementing a program of standard instrumentation in organization studies is then discussed. It is maintained that standardized instrumentation for measuring organization studies constructs would help alleviate the knowledge management problems just mentioned. Advantages and disadvantages of the standard instrumentation program are reviewed, and the conclusion emphasizes the potential contribution of the program.

The Philosophical Foundations of Knowledge Management: Editors' Introduction

Our work on this Special Issue began with a showcase symposium on the philosophical foundations of knowledge management (KM) at the AoM 2004 Meeting and was continued through KM tracks at the EURAM 2005 and EGOS 2005 Conferences. Our hope was to corral the variety of approaches in the KM literature and expose solid underpinnings against which the field's development might be gauged. We were unclear whether these would be axiomatic principles that defined the field or a set of professionally accepted KM practices. The call for papers went out in Fall 2004 and was published in the November 2004 issue of Organization. In our call we asked for advances to the discussion rather than mere reiteration of the already appreciated. Our authors and reviewers made great efforts and we learned much from their submissions, both those included and those turned away, and from the many reviews. However, we found deep disagreements, both among our reviewers about the submissions—and among everyone about the topic area generally. Clearly KM frustrates readers, authors, and reviewers alike; hence the temptation to dismiss it as yet another management fad, as many do. But there is an undeniable enthusiasm for KM among managers and academics, so our first thought was ‘To what problem is KM the answer?’. Framing the question well often takes one towards the answer—so if we puzzle out KM's problematics we may find ourselves moving towards the underpinnings we are looking for.

Knowledge in Four Deformation Dimensions

This paper sketches a complexity conceptualization of knowledge. Building from evolutionary theories, it defi nes knowledge as rules that reduce environmental uncertainty through connections between ideas and facts. Knowledge is conceived as a structure validated through action, a process contextualized in individual experience and a system embedded in social and cultural experience. It exhibits four characteristics of a complex system: it is sensitive to initial conditions, exhibits multiple feedback loops, is non-linear and is recursively symmetrical. Knowledge's four interdependent deformation dimensions are identified (personal, common, tacit and explicit) and their interactions are discussed. This conceptualization of knowledge as a complex system contributes to the knowledge-based theory of the firm by providing some micro-foundations to organizational knowledge, and it opens the opportunity to re-think theories of communities of practice, entrepreneurship and firm creation, the role of managers, and knowledge management.

Organizing Processes in Complex Activity Networks

This paper analyses practice as activity and develops a frame-work for analysing organizations as networks of activity systems. The approach is applied in a study of a high technology company. Key tensions in the organization are outlined and a comparative study of three strategy development teams is described. Activity theory provides the means to analyse organizations as distributed, decentred and emergent knowledge systems. It is suggested that the processes of `perspective making', `perspective taking' and `perspective shaping' are central to the integration of different expert groups that need to co-operate in the pursuit of multiple, perhaps competing, objectives.

What Do Organizations Know? Dynamics of Justification Contexts in R&D Activities

This article suggests a framework for analysing organizational knowledge as a process of justification in different contexts. Drawing upon philosophy, it identifies four principal contexts for justification, implying four different knowledge types: objective knowledge, subjective knowledge, personal knowledge and institutional knowledge. The article provides empirical illustrations of these knowledge types and the justification processes involved from various studies of activities in R&D and engineering. The article contributes to the literature on organizational knowledge in several respects. First, it provides a pluralistic analysis of the concept of knowledge without resorting to an ‘anything goes’ approach. Second, the account of organizational knowledge focuses not on its inherent properties, but rather on the justification context for knowledge claims. Third, organizational knowledge is analysed in a weak sense, where justification contexts both inside and outside the organization play an important role in the dynamics of organizational knowledge. Fourth, the article questions simplified tacit/codified knowledge dichotomies, for example suggesting that more research in organizational knowledge should be refocused towards understanding subjective and institutional knowledge.

Promoting multi-paradigmatic cultural research in international business literature

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to address four questions: what are the drawbacks of an over reliance on the objectivist tradition in culture in international business (CIB) scholarship? Is a shift from mono-paradigmatic to multi-paradigmatic cultural research justified? What explains scholars’ hesitation in engaging in multi-paradigmatic studies? What arguments can we offer to convince them otherwise?

Design/methodology/approach

– Informed by the critical perspective, this paper encourages a shift from mono-paradigmatic to multi-paradigmatic cultural studies. Guided by an emancipatory interest, and treating the field of culture studies as a complex system, this paper offers an integrative complexity (IC) based argument in favor of multi-paradigmatic studies. It argues that multi-paradigmatic studies allow scholars to employ higher IC than mono-paradigmatic studies, resulting in more innovative research outputs.

Findings

– While mono-paradigmatic studies can achieve either predictability of output or in-depth understanding of cultural phenomena, multi-paradigmatic studies are capable of attaining both. The authors illustrate this through the example of a recent multi-paradigmatic study.

Research limitations/implications

– This paper does not offer insights for operationalizing multi-paradigmatic research, nor does it address factors other than IC that may impede scholars from engaging in such studies.

Practical implications

– Shifting from mono-paradigmatic to multi-paradigmatic studies will enable scholars to address questions hitherto left unaddressed in CIB literature, facilitate a better understanding of new organizational forms, and redress the power disequilibrium between different paradigmatic schools. Implications are also offered for the training of cultural researchers in business schools.

Originality/value

– This paper is the first of its kind to relate IC to merits of multi-paradigmatic cultural studies.

Strategy as Practice: Recursiveness, Adaptation, and Practices-in-Use

In this article, a social theory framework is developed to explain the common themes of recursive and adaptive practice underpinning the existing strategic management literature. In practice, there is a coexistent tension between recursive and adaptive forms of strategic action that spans multiple levels from macro-institutional and competitive contexts to within-firm levels of analysis to individual cognition. This tension may be better understood by examining how management practices are used to put strategy into practice. Such practices span multiple levels of context and are adaptable to their circumstances of use, serving to highlight both general characteristics and localized idiosyncrasies of strategy as practice. The article develops the concept of management practices-in-use into a research agenda and nine broad research questions that may be used to investigate empirically strategy as practice.

Conflict, Incommensurability, and Theory Groups

Much is already known about how theory groups—schools of thought centered on the influential works of a small number of scholars—emerge. Yet, little is known about how prolonged periods of conflict between theory groups affects the theory-group life cycle. The author presents a review of critiques and exchanges published by scholars in the organization-environment subfield, and shows that these can be used to identify “emergence,” “conflict,” and “postconflict” periods. Poisson and negative binomial regression analyses of 656 publications show that the frequency of intertheory-group citations decreased following the conflict period (1985-1994). Linear regression models show that, when intertheory-group citations appeared following the conflict period, they were increasingly likely to be of older rather than newer publications. The results suggest that periods of heightened conflict, because of their effect on intertheory-group citations, may impact future theory development.

On Improving the Visibility of Hard-Measurable Process Performance

Performance measurement systems (PMS) are necessary to ensure adequate information supply to management, but an information gap exists between process analysis and execution. PMS predominantly rely on countable, objective measures, but are also designed to deliver additional viewpoints to foster necessary explanations to measurements. Still, there is no definition of how well these approaches work in delivering sufficient explanatory information. The introduced concept of visibility of performance explains how the explication of process performance information leads to additional interpretation possibilities in performance measurement to deliver embedded and rich knowledge. It is tested on a business case, in which additional subjective information could be explicated through the application of a suitable Performance Assessment Model. The result of the explication of this knowledge is an enhanced comprehension of performance that bridges the information gap between operative and strategic level.

Knowledge Beyond the Individual? Making Sense of a Notion of Collective Knowledge in Organization Theory

Although the notion of ‘collective knowledge’ has become a building block of many knowledge-based studies on the organization, there is little clarity about the precise meaning of the term. This paper aims at closing this explanatory gap by investigating the question of what it can mean for knowledge to be collective. In drawing on relevant literatures it analytically distinguishes three types of collective knowledge and elaborates on their nature. Through analysis of their interrelationship and interaction within the organization, these types are integrated into an overarching framework forming a pluralistic epistemology of collective knowledge. Finally, some implications of the proposed epistemological framework for our understanding of higher-order knowledge-related constructs (such as routines and capabilities) as well as for the architecture of firms and industries are outlined.

Critical rationalism and the state of unawareness in managers’ theories

This essay highlights the state of unawareness to which the theories held by managers are susceptible. The essay opens up the question whether the critical rationalist approach, which specifically addresses the unawareness problem in science, is indeed inadequate for organizations as commonly argued. We suggest that organizations apply fragments of the critical rationalist approach anyway, but fail to make the whole because of certain obstructers. By specifying these obstructers we theorize that the critical rationalist approach is applicable once its obstructers are addressed properly. The most fundamental obstructer is the ‘mindless derivation’, meaning the unawareness of the major premise in managers’ theories, by which it cannot be critically discussed and consequently the theories cannot be systematically falsified. We draw an organizational theoretical system as a basis for systematic detection of unawareness and exercise it in a real illustrative case.

Practising Peer Review in Organizations: A Qualifier for Knowledge Dissemination and Legitimization

A key issue in many organizations is how to disseminate information in an effective way and, more importantly, how to make use of this information in order to create new knowledge. One way of addressing this problem is to focus on how information is socially transformed into knowledge. This includes how knowledge is handled in practice and how the knowledge produced is qualified as being something worth knowing and acting upon. Two well-established practices for doing this are the refereeing system and the peer review process. These are used in scientific communities as a means of validating and legitimating knowledge, for example by reviewing journal papers before publishing or project proposals before granting funds, etc. This paper argues that peer review is a useful concept when looking at knowledge creation and legitimization in organizations. The social meaning of peer review is to legitimize new knowledge by organizationally sanctioning it and thereby creating a platform for collective sense making. This paper uses an example from a field study in a pharmaceutical company in order to illustrate this argument. The study took place in a quality support department where the quality of health care products and processes was assessed. The organization had a need for fast and reliable updating of information that could influence how the production process of pharmaceuticals should be carried out. In order to cope with these problems the department established an ‘evaluation loop’, which shared several characteristics with the peer review process.

Innovation through Knowledge Codification

Academics and business professionals are currently showing a significant interest in understanding the management of knowledge and the roles to be played therein by information and communication technology (ICT). This paper takes a closer look at one of the primary issues raised when supporting the management of knowledge: how to understand the role of knowledge classification and codification as means for further organizational learning and innovation. Two manufacturing cases are analysed using particular perspectives from current theories on classification, namely the management of knowledge and organizational innovation. It is concluded that a more complex understanding of the interplay between cognitive and community models for knowledge management as informed by research on the social processes of classification can inform our understanding of both the role of classification of knowledge for organizational innovation and the viability of providing ICT support based on codified knowledge.