Organization Studies

This book demonstrates the importance of the role of knowledge in firms and economies. The authors clarify the theoretical debates on the production and use of knowledge in organizations, and examine the challenges that face those managing knowledge at different levels of the organization. They develop the notion of ‘community’ within the context of the firm and explore the ways in which these communities learn and produce new knowledge, positing from this emphasis a challenging model of distributed governance of knowledge within and beyond firms. Using insights from academic disciplines including economics, science and technology studies, cognitive sciences, economic geography, and management science, the authors use analytical argument and empirical cases to develop a new theorization of knowledge formation and management, and in turn a new conception of the firm.

After twenty-five years of preparation, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, is finally running its intensive scientific experiments into high-energy particle physics. These experiments, which have so captured the public's imagination, take the world of physics to a new energy level — the terascale — at which elementary particles are accelerated to one millionth of a percent of the speed of light and made to smash into each other with a combined energy of around fourteen trillion electron-volts. What new world opens up at the terascale? No one really knows, but the confident expectation is that radically new phenomena will come into view. The kind of Big Science being pursued at CERN, however, is becoming ever more uncertain and costly. Do the anticipated benefits justify the efforts and the costs? This book aims to give a broad organizational and strategic understanding of the nature of Big Science by analyzing one of the major experiments that uses the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS Collaboration. It examines such issues as: the flow of ‘interlaced’ knowledge between specialist teams; the intra- and inter-organizational dynamics of Big Science; the new knowledge capital being created for the workings of the experiment by individual researchers, suppliers, and e-science and ICTs; the leadership implications of a collaboration of nearly three thousand members; and the benefits for the wider societal setting. This book aims to examine how, in the face of high levels of uncertainty and risk, ambitious scientific aims can be achieved by complex organizational networks characterized by cultural diversity, informality, and trust — and where Big Science can head next.

It has long been an interest of researchers in economics, sociology, organization studies, and economic geography to understand how firms innovate. Most recently, this interest has begun to examine the micro-processes of work and organization that sustain social creativity, emphasizing the learning and knowing through action when social actors and technologies come together in ‘communities of practice’; everyday interactions of common purpose and mutual obligation. These communities are said to spark both incremental and radical innovation. This book examines the concept of communities of practice and its applications in different spatial, organizational, and creative settings. Chapters examine the development of the concept, the link between situated practice and different types of creative outcome, the interface between spatial and relational proximity, and the organizational demands of learning and knowing through communities of practice. More widely, the chapters examine the compatibility between markets, knowledge capitalism, and community; seemingly in conflict with each other, but discursively not.

It is now widely recognized that the effective management of knowledge assets is a key requirement for securing competitive advantage in the emerging information economy. Yet the physical and institutional differences between tangible assets and knowledge assets remain poorly understood. In the case of knowledge, the ownership and control of assets are becoming ever more separate, a phenomenon that is actually exacerbated by the phenomenon of learning. If we are to meet the challenges of the information economy, then we need a new approach to property rights based on a deeper theoretical understanding of knowledge assets. This book provides some of the key building blocks that are needed for a theory of knowledge assets. The author develops a conceptual framework, the Information-Space or I-Space, for exploring the way knowledge flows within and between organizations.

Two themes have become epicentres of new management thinking in the late 1990s: knowledge management and competence-based approaches to strategic management. These two themes share a common interest in identifying important forms of organizational knowledge and in understanding processes through which knowledge can be transformed into organizational capabilities and competences. Drawing on the latest research by a number of noted management scholars, this book presents new insights into various kinds of knowledge that are of value to organizations, organizational interactions that can create strategically useful knowledge, alternative processes for managing knowledge, and approaches to integrating key forms of knowledge into organizational processes of competence building and leveraging. The papers in the volume collectively define a powerful conceptual framework for understanding organizational knowledge and its central role in building and leveraging organizational competence. They present well articulated, logically consistent conceptualizations that will provide new theoretical impetus for management researchers, while at the same time providing case studies and examples of practical applications that suggest useful new methods and tools for management practitioners.

Drawing on a three‐year, in‐depth, ‘fly‐on‐the‐wall’ study of client‐management consultant interactions, knowledge flow in management consultancy projects is shown to be mediated by multiple and shifting boundaries or ‘insider‐outsider’ relationships. This challenges dominant assumptions about management consultancy as being either a source of new ideas and processes or simply the legitimation of client knowledge. Rather, different actors, roles, and types of knowledge are involved in an interactive and dynamic process where various boundaries are constructed, reinforced, negotiated, and transformed. The chapters selectively explore these dynamics, revealing the importance of boundary complexity; the role of humour and challenge in often tense relationships; and the importance of shared knowledge domains such as sector knowledge. They are based upon a model of client–consultant relationships developed from theories of knowledge and social boundaries. A wide range of consultancy contexts are covered, including: a US‐based strategy firm and a multinational client; the public and private sectors; a sole practitioner consultant; and IT implementation in financial services. These have a wider significance in terms of our understanding of project working, innovation/change, inter-organizational relations and professional and business services.

This book reflects on a number of challenges associated with management and social science research — the search for a ‘behavioral science’, the limits of rationality, the unreliability of many research findings, the social shaping of research agendas, cultures, and judgements. The book is chronologically structured and includes discussions of research projects and various methodological debates. This is a feisty argument based on all aspects of research — carrying out research programmes, evaluating research, tirelessly questioning the assumptions and claims of social science research, and never avoiding the awkward theoretical or practical challenges that face organizational researchers.