Abstract
Before exploring how organizational knowledge is applied (Chap. 3) and created (Chap. 4) we will develop a general view on organizational knowledge as grounding of organizational concepts. Hereby, we are going to outline a “strong view” which makes knowledge the basis for human action. As such its central relevance is given in all social fields, including of course organizations.
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Notes
- 1.
Author’s translation; original citation: “Wahrnehmungs- und Gliederungsprinzipien”
- 2.
In fact, Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” connects society and individuals (Knoblauch, 2003). The interdependence between subjective and objective, between social field and habitus, or between structure and construction, forms a “structuralist constructivism [strukturalistischer Konstruktivismus]” (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 155) which is very similar to Giddens “structuration”. The inner relation between the theories of Giddens and Bourdieu (and to that of Actor-Network-Theory which will play a crucial role in Chap. 4) is also claimed by John Law (1992, p. 386).
- 3.
Inspired by (Hatch & Cunliffe, 2006, p. 123ff.)
- 4.
Of course this says nothing about success or failure of the new distinctions. Say, the CRM would allow only a very inflexible prioritization of customers leading to dysfunctional effects and non-acceptability by the sales persons. The system then would be too “rigid” and not adaptable to the flexible context of its application. These drawbacks would be challenged with new distinctions: if the system is too inflexible (but still has to stay in place) presumably new distinctions will be developed and informal “workarounds” developed. This may in a longer term evolve to new formal procedures, e.g. to an updated version of the CRM system.
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- 6.
This example is inspired by students of the class “Elektronisch gestütztes Lern- und Wissensmanagement” supervised at the Vienna University of Economic and Business Administration in winter term 2008.
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- 8.
- 9.
My proposed structure actually does not take the problem of objective reference into account. Peirce recognized this additional dimension and called it the “object” vs. the mere “interpretant” – i.e. the object vs. its meaning. For Peirce the “object” marks the entity to which an “interpretant” refers (Peirce, 1897/1932). Note that what we call “concept” is not such an “object”, but much more the integrative relation of correlating representation (syntactic), meaning (semantic) and practice (pragmatic). My account therefore is more similar to Saussures dyadic approach which subsumes “sign” as the unification of “signifier” (as the linguistic form a sign takes) and “signified” (as the meaning, or “idea”, the signifier refers to). Whether that idea is related to an object, i.e. claiming ontological status or even truth, is not relevant to Saussure’s sign theory. The only thing that may claim some sort of ontological status is the signifier: written or spoken words have to exist in order to be interpreted (Saussure, 1959). However, our account extends Saussure’s as we add the pragmatic dimension which was later emphasized by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953/2006).
- 10.
The challenge for organizational studies then, of course, is how to understand and conceptualize organizational knowledge on all three levels, which is also one aim of our inquiry.
- 11.
But notice that although pragmatical distinctions relate knowledge to action, knowledge does not equal action. Knowledge does not determine its real-world application to concrete organizational practice. Hence, organizational knowledge provides the possibility, not the necessity, for actors to construct specific representations, meanings, and actions in their organizational practice. Instead to support a “too strong” sense of knowledge where simply “knowledge is action” we will rather position knowledge as concept with a distance to its concrete application to practice: knowledge is related to action, it not is action (see next Sect. 2.2.4).
- 12.
Another noteworthy position is held by Sybille Krämer who emphasize the material and representational dimension of human mind and thinking (Krämer, 2008, forthcoming 2011). See also the position of Klaus Krippendorff who highlights “meaning” as intersubjective “distinction-making” within the domain of (also organizational) design (Krippendorf, 1984, 1989, 2011; Krippendorf & Butter, 2007).
- 13.
This integrative systematization is very much inspired by JC Spenders distinction of “knowledge-as-data”, “knowledge-as-meaning” and “knowing-as-practice” (Spender, 2008)
- 14.
- 15.
Which is the prototype of the “socialization” conversion (Nonaka et al., 2008, p. 20).
- 16.
Designing knowledge management systems can be rather “technological oriented”, i.e. optimized towards creation and retrieval of knowledge itself, or “human oriented”, i.e. optimized towards creation and retrieval of knowledge holders (Maier & Hädrich, 2001).
- 17.
See also our use-case from Seven-Eleven Japan in Chap. 10.
- 18.
And consequently of course also aims at making the product better.
- 19.
System theory approaches of organizational research drive this even further. According to an “autopoietic” understanding of organizations, members of the organization are placed to the “environment” of the system (i.e. humans are not “part” of the organization but part of the “environment” of the organization). Members become interchangeable and only relevant insofar as their communications and actions are “coupled” to the organizations processes (Simon, 2007, p. 35). The organization then does not consist of its members but of its own operations: organizations are “closed systems” (Baecker, 1998; Luhmann, 1995; Simon, 2007).
- 20.
Having said that, we should also accept the limits of the introduced strong sense of organizational knowledge. Although the crucial importance of knowledge in organization forms both the assumption and the field of this inquiry, we should remember that not all before mentioned concepts, which create the organization (see Chap. 1), can (or should) be covered by and traced back to organizational knowledge. Our inquiry will not opt for some kind of knowledge-centrism which reduces everything in and around organizations to knowledge. I would not even choose to explain, e.g. expert skills or organizational rules by the concept of knowledge alone as other factors like social pressure, power, or culture may be involved as well. However, knowledge in the strong sense is a necessary condition for organizations. Trading off limits against importance of a knowledge-based view, we could conclude that on one hand knowledge for sure is not the only constituent of organizations, but on the other hand no organization would be imaginable without it. This is because no social field is imaginable without its epistemological grounding.
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Seirafi, K. (2013). The Relevance of Organizational Knowledge. In: Organizational Epistemology. Contributions to Management Science. Physica, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34194-6_2
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