Abstract
Standard management practices and procedures aren’t any good for organizing knowledge-work, so we’re in search of ones that are. The work of organizing revolves around people making up their minds and aligning: making plans, establishing priorities, agreeing on schedules, and so on. It is often tough to get some consensus on what to do, when, and how, but having done this, they’ll change their minds, revise their plans, adjust their priorities, or rearrange their calendars. Work practices that not only allow but also encourage people to respond and adapt to changing circumstances are preferable to fixed procedures, commitments to long-term goals, and rigid schedules that quickly become obsolete. When they constantly have to adapt, it is best for people to organize themselves.
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Notes
Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009): 56.
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). As a book about professionals (learning) trajectories, situated learning complements the work of Patricia Benner. See Patricia E. Benner, From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice (Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1984).
“High performance teams” (HPT) started in the emerging discipline of organization development. The term originated at the Tavistock Institute, London, with Eric Trist’s ideas and practices based on his observation of self-organizing teams at work in an English coal mine. Subsequently, HPT came to be associated with the process- improvement movement (“better, quicker, cheaper”) and to be seen as a management objective. See Marc Hanlan, High Performance Teams: How to Make Them Work (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004).
On the early history of knowledge management and its antecedents, see Lawrence Prusak, “Where Did Knowledge Management Come From?” IBM Systems Journal 40, no. 4 (2001): 1002–6; and Patrick Lambe “The Unacknowledged Parentage of Knowledge Management,” Journal of Knowledge Management 15, no. 2 (2011): 175–97. Both authors refer to the leading role that management consultants played in the emergence of knowledge management, while acknowledging a wider set of influences and antecedents that go back to the 1960s. It is not difficult to read into both contributions that knowledge management marks the arrival of knowledge-work and the recognition that, prior to the 1990s, neither management thinking nor practices had anything substantial to say about knowledge at work, or knowledge in work. While some writers, like Verna Allee, recognize that knowledge and knowledge-work ‘changes everything,’ undermining traditional management completely, the field of knowledge management today is dominated by the belief-perpetuated by consultants and vendors of IT products-that you can add knowledge (actually “information”) to management and continue to manage organizations using Taylorist principles and practices, as if nothing fundamental has changed.
Studies include Scott D.N. Cook and John Seely Brown, “Bridging Epistemologies: The Generative Dance between Organizational Knowledge and Organizational Knowing,” Organization Science 10, no. 4 (1999); Wenger, Communities of Practice; Julian E. Orr, Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). In order, they look at flute makers, insurance claims clerks, and technicians who service office copiers.
Asking what is “community,” Zygmunt Bauman refers to the ideas of Ferdinand Tönnies and, more recently, of Göran Rosenberg: “ ‘Common understanding’ ‘coming naturally’ [is] the feature which sets community apart from the world of bitter quarrels, cut-throat competition, and log-rolling … Human loyalties, offered and matter-of- factly expected inside the ‘warm circle’ [Rosenberg’s expression for community], ‘are not derived from external social logic or from any economic cost-benefit analysis.’ ” Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2001): 10. Wenger has a more technical view of what constitutes the community in a CoP, but these ideas are consistent with his emphasis on meaning making and cooperation. They also seem to be consistent with the way field-service technicians may regard their community.
I’ve borrowed the phrase from Hugo Letiche, “Meaning, Organizing, and Empowerment,” in Empowering Humanity: State of the Art in Humanistics, eds. Annemie Halsema and Douwe van Houten (Utrecht: De Tidjstroom Uitgeverij, 2002): 217.
Lovemore Mbigi, Ubuntu: The African Dream in Management (Randburg, South Africa: Knowledge Resources, 1997).
Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid (London: Mandarin, 1990): 14.
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© 2011 Mark Addleson
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Addleson, M. (2011). In search of low-control organizing practices: community, care, cooperation, and commitment. In: Beyond Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230343412_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230343412_10
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