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200 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

• Brokering – for example, cultivating opinion leaders and gatekeepers in order
to connect diverse interests and practices.
• Rhetorical devices – framing the brachytherapy innovation in the wider
discourse of ‘community of care’ in order to mobilize commitment amongst
diverse interest groups.
• Codification – using information tools and artefacts (such as scientific texts,
clinical data, educational material, ‘Centre of Excellence’ templates) to foster
communication across diverse groups.
• Representation – where the interests of different collaborators were refl ected
in the people and activities deployed (Hardy et al., 2003).

Many of these approaches (e.g. network formation) have been examined in
depth in previous chapters. However, networked innovation has several defining
features when it comes to managing knowledge work:

• processes of knowledge integration are central;
• understanding, forming, coordinating and realigning social networks is
crucial;
• technology and other material artefacts can play important roles as ‘boundary
objects’ linking different groups and interests;
• it is inherently politicized and relies on multiple sources of knowledge and
power.

Taking each in turn:

Knowledge integration

Networked innovation is dependent on widely distributed and often very diverse
kinds of knowledge and knowledge workers. Therefore integration is a central
knowledge process. Views as to how this actually happens are varied, depending
on the approach to knowledge being used. Writers adopting a ‘knowledge as
possession’ view, then, see knowledge integration as the ‘combination’ of dif-
ferent bodies of explicit and tacit knowledge (Nonaka, 1994). In contrast those
with a ‘knowledge as practice’ view place greater emphasis on the development
of shared understandings and boundary spanning activities as a pre-requisite
of integration (Boland and Tenkasi, 1995). Knowledge integration is discussed
more fully in Chapter 4.

Social networks
Chapter 8 explored the important role of networks in knowledge work, either
(or both) as channels for communicating information or as processes for build-
ing communities and sharing knowledge/practice. Social networks are often
seen, then, as having a positive impact on the diffusion and implementation

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