Frank Blackler

Knowledge, Knowledge Work and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation

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.

On the Life of the Object

‘[Feuerbach] does not see how the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the previous one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying the social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given to him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse.’ (Marx and Engels, 1845/1968: 57–8)

Power, Mastery And Organizational Learning

The topic of power has not featured strongly in debates about organizational learning, a point that is illustrated in a discussion of influential studies of teamworking. Despite the insights that such studies have provided into the nature of expertise and collaboration they have tended not to explore the relevance of issues of hierarchy, politics and institutionalized power relations. The paper addresses the problem by exploring the links between power, expertise and organizational learning. Power is analysed both as the medium for, and the product of, collective activity. The approach emphasizes how skills and imaginations are intertwined with social, technical and institutional structures. While studies of teamworking have concentrated on situations where imaginations and structures are tightly linked, unexpected developments may occur when these relations are loosened. Such situations occur when the needs of the moment overshadow normal routines and relationships and there is no single overview or centre of control. It is suggested that organizational learning can be conceptualized as the movement between familiar and emergent activities and between established and emergent social relations. Events in a two-year action research project are used to illustrate the approach and explore episodes of decentred collaboration.

The Design and Evaluation of a Leadership Programme for Experienced Chief Executives from the Public Sector

The article describes an action learning programme designed to ‘renew and refresh’ long-serving chief executives in the English National Health Service who were facing considerable performance pressures. An activity theoretical approach was used to help participants stand back from the imperatives of the moment and reflect on the dilemmas of their situations in new ways. Evaluation data suggest that the mix of events included in the programme created a powerful learning experience for most participants. Other theoretical approaches in addition to activity theory are used to explain this outcome. It is suggested that, at times of ongoing change and frustration, programmes such as the one described here can help participants develop a resilient approach to conflicts and tensions and may stimulate commitment and resolve.

Institutional Reform and the Reorganization of Family Support Services

Accounts of institutional change developed from structuration theory (Barley and Tolbert, 1997; Greenwood et al., 2002) are compared with an account developed from Foucauldian theory (Hasselbladh and Kallinikos, 2000). They are considered in the context of a project that was intended to pioneer a new, integrated approach to child and family support services in a deprived area in the North of England. It was undertaken at a time when the British government was pursuing an ambitious programme of reform across the public sector. The project challenged entrenched practices in the statutory agencies (social services, health, education and the police) and also those within independent, voluntary organizations providing services to children and families in the area. None of the theories of institutional change considered here anticipated the muddles, misunderstandings, false starts and loose ends that were a feature of the case. While both structuration theory and Foucauldian theory stress the significance of the internalization of new ideas, problems in this case developed because of the difficulties participants had in externalizing new approaches into new practices. This overlooked aspect of institutional change is conceptualized as a ‘contested ascent’ from the abstract to the concrete.

Post(-)modern organizations: understanding how CSCW affects organizations

The paper reviews the ways organizations are thought to be changing as a result of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). While claims which exaggerate the impact of technological changes should not be taken seriously, within the context of current developments in world capitalism CSCW assumes particular importance raising cultural and organizational problems at least as much as economic and technological ones. The flexibility, variety and disorder associated with ‘post-modern’ organizations (i.e. organizations characteristic of the epoch after modernism) necessitate the adoption of ‘postmodern’ approaches to understanding (i.e. approaches to the theory of knowledge developed in linguistics and philosophy) which emphasise the significance of communication, interpretation, improvization, negotiation and learning processes. The suggestion is that, for the impact of CSCW to be understood, conventional theories of organization should be replaced by theories of collective activity.

Information systems design and planned organization change: applying Unger's theory of social reconstruction

Abstract Much has been learned in recent years about how information technologies can be introduced effectively to established organizations. Progress has been more limited, however, in exploring the opportunities the technologies provide to rethink conventional assumptions about organizing, Traditional approaches to planning require an early specification of desired end results and are of limited value in the development of unfamiliar roles and structures. Ungers social theory suggests a different approach. It emphasizes how the cognitive schemas people use in everyday life interact with social and institutional structures to provide a set of pragmatic assumptions which obscures recognition of alternatives. The approach can be used to explain why ambitions for organizational change through the introduction of new technologies are likely to be limited, but it suggests that techniques can be developed to alert designers and end-users to the ‘formative contexts’ within which they are working, to review the...

Organising for Incompatible Priorities

Over the past two decades a series of radical changes has overtaken the British National Health Service. A range of tensions, incoherencies and uncertainties that are not easy to understand or to manage now permeate the institution. This chapter reviews aspects of this situation and, in the context of the new Labour government’s wish to encourage responsive public services and collaborative working between NHS-funded organisations, local government and voluntary agencies, suggests how the situation might be conceptualised, researched and changed.

Organizational Psychology: Good Intentions and False Promises

Theory and practice within organizational psychology have been greatly influenced by humanistic psychology in general and theories of self-actualization in particular. Yet the concept of self-actualization is problematic, and may encourage a misguided view of people as exploiting each other and their environments in a hedonistic quest for satisfaction. Applied in an organizational context such an interpretation of the human condition would demean human interactions. Further, organizational psychologists have employed the humanistic paradigm in a search for effective ways of managing organizations while giving insufficient attention to a study of the wider effects that organizations have upon people in society. Coupled with an inadequate model of man such limited horizons may have led them to play an essentially conservative role in their work and to support institutional structures which could be seriously debilitating psychologically. A review of implicit assumptions within the discipline is required.

Co-Orienting the Object: An Activity-Theoretical Analysis of the UK’s National Program for Information Technology

This paper contributes to research on the success and failure of information and communication technologies (ICT) by focusing on the learning processes associated with the development of new ICT projects and the way they challenge and extend familiar organizational limits. Drawing on recent developments in activity theory, we provide an analysis of oral and written evidence taken before a House of Commons Committee in relation to the UK’s National Program for IT (NPfIT). Our preliminary findings point to the ways in which new objects of activity such as the NPfIT can emerge from the meeting of contrasting forms of discursive activity, as well as how new policy insights can be translated into new organizational practices. We conclude with some implications for further research.