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172 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

In this way, stories link information with interest, values and relevance, giving us
a sense of the context in which experience has been developed and helping us to
grasp the tacit nature of some of the knowledge being communicated.
Emergent communities can be seen as a vital ingredient in the individual orga-
nization’s ability to learn – making knowledge a collective resource for the orga-
nization, rather than the property of a particular individual. A good example of
this is provided by Orr’s (1990) influential study of customer service representa-
tives (‘reps’) who repair the photocopiers of Xerox customers. From the manage-
ment viewpoint, a rep’s work is well-defined and largely independent. Customers
with problems call the Customer Service Centre, which in turn notifies a rep. He
or she goes to the customer’s site and, with the help of the error codes displayed
and a problem-solving manual, diagnoses the problem and applies the specified
fix. When Orr looked at the reps’ work more closely, however, he found that they
did not operate independently at all. Their working day typically revolved around
informal meetings with other reps over breakfast, lunch and coffee. At these
meetings the reps would swap war stories about malfunctioning machines that
could not be repaired simply by going through the know-what of the repair man-
ual. This sharing of stories was not a technical exercise, just part of their everyday
socializing. Orr found that one of these informal conversations would be worth
hours of training. While chatting, the reps posed questions to each other, offered
solutions, laughed at mistakes and generally kept each other up to date about
what they knew and what they had learned on the job. As a result, knowledge
was shared extensively about the ways of dealing with unusual glitches and prob-
lems that were simply not covered in the photocopier repair manual.
While the Xerox case highlights the value of the emergent community as a
forum for knowledge sharing, it is important to acknowledge some of the poten-
tially negative implications of such settings for the management of knowledge
work. In Chapter 3, for example, we highlighted the problem of ‘groupthink’
as one of the negative potential outcomes of team-working. Although emergent
communities operate on a much more extensive scale and are not subject to the
same group dynamics, the potential loss of objectivity can also be a problem
where large numbers of people come to share a similar world-view or perspec-
tive (Locke, 1999). The danger inherent in such communities is for a more
conservative outlook to dominate, creating barriers against external groups or
new ideas. As we will observe in Chapter 9, this can frustrate innovation projects
as it inhibits the kind of knowledge sharing and trust which such projects need
to achieve across communities or professional groups.
Although there is much evidence for the value of a community approach
to knowledge work, in the past organizations were reluctant to develop this
approach. This is partly because management have tended to emphasize indi-
vidual roles and the use of technology to ‘capture’ knowledge. The concept of a
community can often seem nebulous to managers who favour more immediate
solutions for their problems.
A further problem for management is that the cultural features of emergent
communities often run counter to the established norms of the organization.
Their implicit values tend to be based on collegiality, reciprocity and influence

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