denotes premium content | May 23 2013 Feature
posted 1 Jun 1998 in Volume 1 Issue 6
Organising Knowledge
J. Seely Brown and
Paul Duguid focus on three issues relating to the organisation of knowledge.
They consider some of the contradictory features of knowledge; how it can be
intangible, ‘sticky’ and ‘leaky’ at the same time concluding that we should be
looking to combine the material with the virtual world to succeed with
organising knowledge.
Discussions of organizing knowledge concern themselves primarily with
one of three issues:
1. How to produce or generate something almost intangible.1
2. How to manage and coordinate
something that, in von Hippel’s term, is ‘sticky’.2
3. How to enter the market with
something that is, on the one hand, hard to commodify, yet, on the other hand,
often ‘leaky’.3
Together, these three appear
incoherent. It is hard to imagine anything that is simultaneously intangible,
sticky and leaky. From the perspective we present here, however, these
differences reflect less incoherence than different stages in the production,
development and use of knowledge.4 They also
reflect distinct perspectives on those different stages. Issue one reflects the
problem of locating useful knowledge production - a problem of particular
interest to the folks in R&D; two reflects the problems of strategic
management and IT in dealing with inchoate knowledge; while three reflects the
organizational and economic challenges of controlling knowledge as it becomes
progressively more robust. Recognizing all three together - and the feedback
loops and tensions they produce - are among the central demands of organizing
knowledge.
Social knowledge
Some knowledge is inextricably
communal in its production. Knowledge-based arguments about the firm lean
heavily on Polanyi’s notions of ‘personal knowledge’, and in particular, ‘tacit
knowledge’.5 This sort of
knowledge, similar to ‘know how’ rather than to ‘know what’,6 emerges not through detached
reflection so much as through action and participation. The dynamic process of
knowing has both epistemological and organizational significance.7Implicit, tacit and dynamic, this
sort of knowledge resists explication, commodification and exchange - either in
or out of the market. It cannot simply be parcelled up and passed from those who
know to those who learn. From an individual’s perspective, the process of
acquiring knowledge involves not ingesting or receiving objective knowledge, but
becoming a member of a community of practice and coming simultaneously to share
and participate in its collective knowledge.8 In terms of learning, moreover,
practice is not simply a method for inducting new members into community
membership. It is also the way communities learn about the world - the way they
produce new knowledge. Given humanity’s social character and the way people
divide labor among themselves, the bulk of new human knowledge arises through
social practice as people work together on shared, collective and coordinated,
but divided, tasks. Here, then, we depart somewhat from Polanyi or Nonaka and
Takeuchi9 in suggesting that not
all knowledge has its origin in individuals. Important knowledge and knowing are
collectively produced and held.
This social process of knowledge
production involves collective sense-making and judging as people, by engaging
in densely shared practice, develop collective background assumptions and
methods of investigation and validation. Developing practice changes a
community’s world view, which in turn provides new perspectives on practice. The
process is a dialectical one, with the new practice being shaped by the
community’s assumptions and vice versa. In a parallel fashion, the community
shapes the practice and, reciprocally, the practice shapes the community. The
practice, the perspective and the community are, in certain ways, mutually
defining, inseparable and dynamic.
Consequently, the complex new
behaviors of particular communities can, on the one hand, be almost impossible
to replicate outside the community and, from the outside, easily appear
abstruse, absurd or trivial. Von Hippel suggests the problem is that ‘one does
not know in advance which subset of… information will be relevant to
anticipating relevant features’.10
To which we would add, that such behaviors can be so profoundly implicit that
they do not even emerge as information, relevant or irrelevant. They are simply
practice. In developing knowledge, the routes a community of practice follows,
the standards it sets, and the warrants it uses are inextricable from practice.
When the knowledge is inchoate, it is often inexplicable without engaging in the
practice.
Overall, as communities develop new practices, knowledge develops - but
not as an aggregate of individual contributions, like adding bricks to a wall.
It is more like the mixing of color, where the outcome requires several
contributions, but the process and product dissolve individual contributions
indivisibly. Organizational synthesis of knowledge, then, may not begin with a
step from individuals to groups or communities. Rather, it may begin with
communities. Synthesis involves the articulation into a larger whole of the
knowledge of distinct communities - going from palette to composition (to
continue our painting metaphor).
Organizational learning in
practice
The ways that organizations go about learning vary dramatically. Many
look on the challenge as one of gathering information about a detached set of
circumstances. They conduct market surveys or they monitor incoming customer
service calls. They analyze the results, build them into databases and pass
these out to the people in production, sales and service, for instance, who then
modify their routines to reflect the customer needs. This centralized, detached
information-gathering and top-down dissemination, while clear and simple in
plan, places too much faith in individuals and information as the focus of
learning. Social practice, with its awkward dynamics, is almost entirely
missing.
Yet
organizations are never detached from their environment, and that environment is
rarely static. Indeed, a great deal of organizational activity or ‘enacting’11 aims directly at engaging in and
stirring up its environment. The same organizations that attempt to monitor the
customer base are usually involved in simultaneously influencing it through new
products, better service, marketing, advertising and sales.
Moving from a top-down, centralized to
a bottom-up, diffused approach turns things around in several ways. It may limit
the scope of inquiry, but it can increase the depth dramatically. Instead of
starting by detaching information from the context that makes it valuable, this
approach tries to develop knowledge out of engagement. It also relies on the
people who are actually engaged in the practice to develop the knowledge.
Eureka
Xerox’s ‘Eureka’ project illustrates a
process of organizational knowledge production in situ. It not only relies on
situated knowledge of customer activity, but it deploys the very people who must
work in those situations to develop that knowledge.
Previously, Xerox had taken an ex ante
approach to customer service. It provided service technicians with detailed
instructions of how to deal with machine behavior. Unfortunately, the machines
did not obey company procedures and, in the end, the only way for technicians to
operate was to disobey them too. The technicians developed their own,
non-canonical practices to handle the emergent and unanticipated in the machine
and the needs of the customer's community.12
The Eureka project has helped to
consolidate this turn around from top down to bottom up.13 It has provided a dynamic central
database of problems and service tips to capture new problems as they have
emerged. Such databases are not uncommon. But often they flood with information
of varied provenance and value. Once they do, the use value of the database as
whole drops precipitously. By contrast, with Eureka, technicians themselves
build and validate what goes into their database. As a consequence of this
filtering, content reflects the leading edge of the collective understanding of
a broad community of technicians all engaged in shared practice, with a shared
background and shared belief in what is useful and what is not. The database
contains the gems of understanding without the dross amongst which those gems
are originally found. The value of Eureka - and it has proved immensely valuable
- lies in the way it reflects not ‘information’ in general, which can be
infinitely varied, but the local, specific knowledge produced by
participants.
Conclusion
The virtual should extend and
transcend the limits of the social while at the same time honoring its salient
features of division and boundedness. In the light of a social theory of
knowledge production, not only do organizations and their role need
reappraising, but so do technologies. In designing organizations, people
consider not simply individuals and information, but also communities,
communication and knowledge. Technology design must face the same demands,
though today it often avoids them. Once communities, communication and knowledge
come into consideration, for example, the implicit claim, often made, that
technologies can replace social institutions, looks extremely dubious. More
often than not, such arguments are merely a sleight of hand, a quick confusion
of social systems with technological systems.
It is confusion over social systems
and technological systems that has allowed many firms to conclude that an
intranet will meet the challenge of synthesizing knowledge. For genuine
synthesis, technology will be vital. But design must engage directly with the
social institutions it hopes to address. Too often it assumes these can simply
be bypassed.
Here, the issue of reach and reciprocity comes back again. Social
factor, we argue, demand reciprocity, though this inevitably serves to check the
implicit paradigm of limitless reach implicit in a good deal of technology
design. The increasing reach of technologies is unquestionably of colossal
importance. It is equally important, however, that striving for reach does not
disrupt the need for social reciprocity.
Reciprocity is difficult to handle. It
involves not just simple tit-for-tat, but rather the means for all participants
in technologically linked interactions to participate fully. It remains a common
lament on the Web that most design there only simulates interaction.
Some emerging
technologies suggest richer possibilities for reciprocity are under development.
New forms of multicasting over the net offer denser forms of interaction
(without needing the infinite bandwidth that seems to be just around the corner
and for which we are always told to wait). But many of the demands here are, of
course, social not technological. Reciprocity, as we have described it, is
similar to what Lave and Wenger refer to as legitimate peripheral
participation.14 Intriguingly, new
communications technologies have gone a long way to provide peripherality. This
allows us to lurk on the side of interactions in which we are not taking part
and of communities of which we are not members.15 Better technologies will also
support increasingly fuller participation. None the less, it remains for social
groups, not technologies, to determine legitimacy.
The rewards of reciprocity, we
believe, are high. But it also has demands. It limits the control that can be
exerted through communication. And it also limits the scope of participation.
Full reciprocity is only possible among relatively small groups. Reach, by
contrast, sometimes seems infinite. Ignoring reciprocity only makes
technologically mediated participation more difficult. But technology that can
recognize and to some extent parse how relations within communities (where need
for reciprocity is high) differ from those between, may actually help to extend
reach between communities without disrupting reciprocity within. We suspect that
coming to understand the challenges of the between relation should be a
significant issue for new design.
One important issue here involves the
local informality found within communities is distinct from a certain level of
explicitness and formality demanded between. In the past, digital technology has
focused heavily on the explicit, ignoring how, on the one hand, much that is
implicit simply cannot be rendered explicit and, on the other, when what can be
is rendered is explicit that transformation can profoundly affect the social
relations in play.
For instance, in many situations, asking for explicit permission changes
social dynamics quite dramatically - and receiving a direct rejection can change
them even further. Consequently, people negotiate many permissions tacitly. A
great deal of trust grows up around the ability to work without explicit
permissions. Contrast this with what are now called ‘trusted systems’. These are
technological systems that in fact eliminate the need for social trust. They
simply prevent people from behaving in ways other than those explicitly
negotiated ahead of time. Everything must be agreed (and paid for, usually) ex
ante. For high security demands, such technologies will be increasingly
important - people are glad they can trust bank machines. But if new
technologies ask people to negotiate their social interrelationships like their
banking relations, they will leave little room for the informal and the tacit.
By contrast, technology that can respond to the implicit in human relations may
both help foster trust and remove a great deal of the burden of using
technology.
One
goal for bringing these divided issues - formal/informal; explicit/implicit;
organization/ecology; technological/social - together may be through thinking
not of replacing the social, material world with a technological, virtual one,
but to consider bringing the two together. In this way, the virtual should
extend and transcend the limits of the social while at the same time honoring
its salient features of division and boundedness. Vague though this prescription
may seem, it holds for us intimations of what we mean by pursuing both reach and
reciprocity in organizing knowledge.
This article first appeared in
‘Web--weaving: Intranets, Extranets and Strategic Alliances’, edited by the late
Peter Lloyd and Paula Boyle. ISBN 0 7506 3866 4
