Valuing of knowledge in organizations and its embedding into organizational practices and routines.

AutorChcrinan, Andrea
CargoTexto en ingl

1 Introduction

The area of organizational knowledge (OK) has been widely studied, stimulating a discussion on how individual knowledge becomes embedded in organizational knowledge (Gherardi, 2000; Orlikowski, 2002; Patriotta, 2003). The articles that explore OK point to the mechanisms used by individuals that intervene or bias the attribution of importance and valuation of certain types of knowledge to the detriment of others, and which influence the behavior of members in the subsequent incorporation of knowledge in the organization. In turn, studies on organizational routines (OR) are divided between the ones that analyze the capabilities that structure routines and those that study the practices that enact routines (Parmigiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011), without, however, taking into account how the conception of knowledge of individuals considered relevant in that context influences the embedding of individual knowledge in organizational practices.

This study directly addresses the question of how individually valued knowledge is embedded and used in organizational routines and practices. It thus investigates behavior that results from adopting and internalizing what individuals consider the most valued specific knowledge into an organization. Hence, the objective of the study is to analyze how the different modes (conceptions) by which organizational members perceive and experience valuing of knowledge in the work context impact the subsequent embedding of that knowledge into organizational routines. To this end, a phenomenographic research was conducted (Akerlind, 2005; Matron, 1981; Marton & Booth, 1997; Sandberg, 2000) with human resources (HR) professionals who, in principle, convey routines, culture, structure, strategies, organizational skills and training-development-education, and who forge the vision of shared knowledge among the different groups of the organization.

Organizational knowing, in this paper, is defined by the perspective of knowing-in-practice and knowing-in-action, from the standpoint of practice-based theorizing, according to which knowledge results from work practice and is inseparable from the historical, social, spatial and temporal context experienced by individuals (Gherardi, 2000; Orlikowski, 2002; Patriotta, 2003). As an analogous theoretical vision, we adopt the stream of routines in practice, embedded through their execution, which feature both an ostensive and a performative character that results from a coordination that is fixed and undergoes continuous contextual adaptations and changes (Feldman, 2000; Feldman & Pentland, 2003; Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011; Pentland, 1995; Pentland & Haerem, 2015). Based on this theoretical perspective and supported by phenomenography, the study focuses on knowledge of value and organizational routines expressed and perceived by individuals as being relevant according to their experience in a given context. However, no detailed analysis of organizational routines established a priori is performed; the study rather focuses on the behavior of individuals and the organization regarding the embedding of knowledge deemed important into organizational routines and practices.

This paper is divided into six sections: 1) introduction; 2) theoretical framework underlying the analysis; 3) method, including the details of its application; 4) findings of the empirical research; 5) discussion about the valuing of knowledge and its embedding into organizational practice and routines; 6) conclusions.

2 Theoretical framework

2.1 Organizational knowledge and value: definitions in the context of the study

Views of organizational knowledge have been discussed by Gherardi (2000), Orlikowski (2002), and Patriotta (2003) and, according to them, its literature developed into three different lines. The first line treats knowledge as dichotomous, as a pre-existing object, independent of the knower, which can be retained and transferred from one mind to another (e.g., Nonaka, 1994; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1997). The second line, the structural or economic line, knowledge emerges as a factor of production, a commodity, reified into routines in the form of strategic capabilities, found in the resource-based view (Barney, 1991; 1996) and the knowledge-based view (Grant, 1996; Prahalad & Hamel, 1990). The third line understands OK contextually, inserted in and emerging from organizational practice and action, where knowing and performing work in such a context are inseparable. This is the approach of knowing-in-practice (Gherardi, 2000), knowing-in-action (Orlikowski, 2002), situated cognition and technical-scientific cognition (Patriotta, 2003), adopted as the theoretical foundation and for data analysis in this paper.

The three lines of OK presented in the paragraph above are not mutually exclusive, but are different approaches to the same subject: knowledge in organizations and ways to conceive it and treat it. The vision of knowing-in-practice and knowing-in-action, however, affords a synthetic approach, thereby making the historical-socio-spatial-temporal context experienced by individuals inherent to and inseparable from the emergent knowledge (Antonacopulou, 2006; Brown & Duguid, 1991; Gherardi, 2000; Latour, 2012; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Orlikowski, 2002; Patriotta, 2003). The Sociology of Association or the Actor-Network Theory by Latour (2012), inserted into that view, underlies the explanatory dimension of the discussion in this study. According to that view, knowledge is relational, made up and mediated by human and non-human actors who form a social group, a collective arrangement. As for non-human actors, Latour (2012) presents all the mediating aspects that demand and compel human actors to act, such as organizational culture, decision/power structures, organizational practices and routines per se, and reification of 'leadership,' 'upper management,' 'strategy,' and 'hierarchy,' among others.

The author claims that although all actors--both human and non-human ones--are on the same plane and are the same size, some exert a greater collective weight due to the 'panorama' that conditions the actors' way of thinking and their justifications, but also due to the circulating 'structuring patterns' and the comparative 'scales' produced by the collective itself. The structuring pattern, panoramas and scales strongly establish the ways of thinking, acting and being that are part of the social structure. Any contextual change of that structure may alter these elements and everything it produces. Consequently, emergent knowledge is negotiated, contested, and always provisionally permanent until new knowledge come up as a result of a contextual change of the structure (Latour, 2012).

According to this perspective of knowingin-practice and knowing-in-action, value is defined as a collective sense of mutual appreciation. As such, it is socially constructed (Swart, 2011). Thus, in a specific context, a group assigns value to the result of a given activity (Swart, 2011). Through work practice, through action within a given context, the value of knowledge becomes visible to the members of that organization (Nag et ah, 2007).

2.2 Organizational routines

Organizational routines go back to the work by Dewey (1922) on habit and reflexive action as the first guides for individual and collective behavior. Subsequently, Simon (1947), March and Simon (1958), and Cyert and March (1963) conceived OR as simple rules, a loosely agglutinated programming aimed at performance that enables the organization to react to the environment (March & Simon, 1958), where standard procedures, rules and standards of behavior are developed to save time and to pay attention to certain aspects during decision making analysis (Simon, 1947).

However, Nelson and Winter (1982) definitively established the organizational routines, defined as patterns of regular and predictable organizational behavior, i.e., genes that define heritage and the exclusive distinction which organizations leverage for their evolutionary change. Additionally, routines are understood as: performance targets, promoting control mechanisms and the bases for replication; repositories of organizational memory, so that the organization prompts itself to trigger specific routines for specific individuals according to certain stimuli. Nelson and Winter (1982) reinforce the contextual character of routines, where skills, organization and technology are closely interconnected within a functional routine.

Pentland (1995) adds the perspective of practice to OR emphasizing daily actions associated with specific routines. The author introduces the notion of performative routines, which require that individuals make choices based on a large repertoire of possibilities; the resulting performance, on the other hand, is better conceived as an effort that is made as a result of the action. This perspective does not only take into account emergent routines that result from the performance of multiple actors (Feldman, 2000; Parmigiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011), but also the generative ones, as they feature their own internal dynamics for their continuity and change (Feldman & Pentland, 2003; Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011).

Thus, although the initial concept associates the idea of OR to fixed, static, and repetitive rules and procedures that control activities and behaviors, the notion of OR evolved and as per Feldman (2000), routines incorporate continuous adaptations and changes into actions, into the practice of their execution, according to the context. These ideas resulted into two different constitutive lines of study as to what a comprehensive view of OR might be (Parmigiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011).

The first line, the one of Capabilities, treats routines as a black box and analyzes them as a unique and complete entity; it focuses on the purpose and motivation of routines and on their impact on organizational performance. Individuals...

Para continuar a ler

PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃO

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT