Organizational Knowledge

Conceptual Overview

Organizational knowledge depends, like beauty, on the eye of the beholder. The many different accounts of organizational knowledge currently in circulation are rooted in a variety of disciplines and epistemologies. Thus, some writers see organizational knowledge as “hard” and objectlike. What gives knowledge these qualities may vary—in some instances, it may be encoded in discrete statements of cause-effect relations; in others, it is embedded as a learned set of behaviors. The important implication of this approach, however, is that knowledge is viewed as an entity that can be transferred or exploited by the organization. In direct contrast, other studies develop a “soft” view of knowledge; that is, they see knowledge as something that is socially constructed as part of everyday existence and is therefore woven into the fabric of organized activities among social groups. In this view, knowledge is not easy to transfer precisely because it is so intertwined with the organizational and social contexts in which it develops.

The assumptions underlying these differing accounts are often implicit, which further contributes to the ambiguity surrounding the term inasmuch as in various studies, organizational knowledge may equally denote knowledge in, of, and by the organization. Thus, in some studies, the organization may be seen primarily as a repository for the creation, retention, and exploitation of hard forms of knowledge. Conversely, other studies take a softer view and present organizational knowledge as the glue that binds actors and artifacts together in action. And yet others see the organization itself as an actor, able to learn from and adapt to its environment.

As a result of these differences in perspective, there is a lack of consensus, not only as to what knowledge is, but also as to what makes it an organizational rather than a personal or group attribute. In some accounts, organizational knowledge is little more, or less, than the aggregation of individual knowledge and skills. In others, there is greater attention to the interweaving of knowledge and organizing processes. In these accounts, organizational knowledge is still created through the learning of individuals and teams, but this learning is captured in the form of rules, standards, and routines and applied across the organization as a whole.

This diversity in views is growing, with more-recent contributions questioning many of the assumptions of the established literature. Despite, or perhaps because of, this growing diversity, the concept of organizational knowledge plays an increasingly important role in debates across a wide range of academic fields, including economics, strategic management, information systems, and organization studies. Significantly, much of the established literature on organizational knowledge derives from studies in the organizational learning field and as such can be traced back to the work of James March and Herbert Simon. Although this field has spawned many different studies of organizational knowledge, such studies tend to share the cognitivist view of knowledge that informed that earlier work. This view focuses on the cognitive construction of reality: the idea that mental processes of search, reflection, and adaptation are the key to understanding how organizations respond to their environments. In the earlier work, in particular, the hard view of organizational knowledge was predominant, and authors likened such knowledge to the programming of a computer.

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