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210 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

that people assume different work roles (e.g. managing director, consultant,
operations, technical specialist) linked very often to different types of knowl-
edge and expertise (e.g. operations, sales, finance, design, IT) and to different
political agendas and interests. These divisions of practice result in knowledge
boundaries, making it especially difficult to design and implement innovations
(e.g. ERP Systems) that cross these boundaries (as seen in Chapter 3). Someone
in Sales, for example, may want to promise ‘the world’ to customers and may
simply not appreciate the burden this places on in the practices of someone else
in production.
Practice perspectives remind us, then, that the problem of innovation is less
to do with the amount of knowledge and information available and more to
do with the way knowledge sticks to (divided) practices. More practically, it
suggests that we need to identify where divisions of practice lie (which may or
may not coincide with the formal structures of the organization) and work on
connecting up practices for knowledge to be transformed into innovation. For
example, Dougherty (2003) studied to the ability of firms to exploit ‘practice-
based knowledge’ for innovation. Practice-based knowledge involves ‘connect-
ing scientific or technical principles to details of the specific context, piecing
together an understanding of the problem from the situation itself, and gener-
ating possible solutions through action’ (Dougherty, 2003, p. 267) and is built
through ongoing interactions among practitioners and clients. She investigated
innovation in eight service companies, focusing on the way they exploited dif-
ferent types of practice-based knowledge (in particular around making sense of
users needs, identifying problems and trends and designing services/using tech-
nology). She found, on the whole, that service firms were very bad at exploiting
practice-based knowledge and attributed this to two main problems:

(i) The organization of work into discrete parts and the divisions of knowl-
edge/practice this creates make it very difficult for people to develop shared
understandings about what they are doing. This prevents knowledge pro-
cesses (i.e. developing, sharing, integrating) from actually happening or, as
Dougherty (2003) put it, ‘everyday interactions were organized so that they
systematically dispersed or dismembered practice-based knowledge about
technologies or user needs’ (p. 283).
(ii) People quite naturally focus attention on their local, day-to-day practices.
This means that the overall complexity of the wider organization of work
practices they are part of is shifted into the background. The complexity of
organizational practices are reduced, then, into abstract, highly simplified,
norms and ‘rules of thumb’ (e.g. about ‘the way we treat patients’) that are
often rigid, inflexible and non-negotiable, and, yet, govern what happens
on the ground. This, Dougherty argues, is problematic for innovation. For
example, in Medico the ‘interpretive scheme’ of Medico staff when faced
with the product innovation was initially to dismiss it as ‘a medical device
and we are not a medical device company’.

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