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Power and Its Enactment: A Traditional View and Its Consequences

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Managing Knowledge in Organizations

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Abstract

Power has often been ignored or considered as an afterthought within the domain of knowledge management (KM). This chapter shows that by ignoring how power shapes ‘knowledge-claims’ as discursive practice into ‘valid knowledge’ (also as discursive practice), we not only act naively on the one hand, but also enact various dysfunctional outcomes and consequences. Such claims on knowledge neutrality, on the one hand, not only ignores knowledge’s inherent subjectivity but also places it on a (false) pedestal of untouchability, and consequently either short circuits or de-legitimizes many social interactions normally involved within more democratic organizational decision-making processes. One of the problems is that power has traditionally been viewed within a resource-based, top-down approach. As such, a closer examination is taken on this more traditional view, as part of a larger perspective which views power-as-possession or entity. Enactment theory is then revisited in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies (sometimes referred to as the Pygmalion or Golem effect) to then explain how the power-as-possession viewpoint becomes a reality within organizations—which, in turn, has a material consequence on an organization’s ability to enable the development of mètis.

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  1. University of Quebec at Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    W. David Holford

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Correspondence to W. David Holford .

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Holford, W.D. (2020). Power and Its Enactment: A Traditional View and Its Consequences. In: Managing Knowledge in Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41156-5_5

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