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INTRODUCTION 13

be moved around much like other resources such as money. Like other resources
the aim is to accumulate it and move it around for the good of the organization.
In short, more knowledge equals more profit. However, there is no particular
reason, a priori, why benefit should automatically follow from having more and
more knowledge. As seen with the widespread diffusion of e-mail, it is quite con-
ceivable that information overload might result and/or that existing, embedded
knowledge might constrain attempts to do new things. Thus knowledge, unlike
money, is not valuable in and of itself, but only where it is applied to specific tasks
(McDermott, 1999).
Another criticism of this approach is that it assumes a so-called ‘function-
alist’ view of organizations (Burrell and Morgan, 1979). In other words an
organization is depicted as a collection of interdependent parts (e.g. machines
and people) that work in harmony towards a common, agreed upon, goal –
(e.g. organizational survival and profit). However, this assumes that com-
mon goals actually exist in organizations and, therefore, does not address
important issues of power and conflict in organizations and in society at large
(Foucault, 1980). For example, encouraging individual employees to surren-
der their knowledge for the benefit of ‘the organization’ may actually ben-
efit shareholders or senior managers but can, equally, be for the individuals
themselves. This is one reason why individuals may choose to ‘hoard’ rather
than share knowledge. Moreover, it is quite conceivable that those in power
could use knowledge to further their own interests rather than the interests
of the collective organization.
As well as theoretical objections, there are some very practical issues when
it comes to using structural approaches to manage knowledge work. For one
thing, understanding types of knowledge (e.g. tacit/explicit) and where it
resides (e.g. individual/collective) does not actually tell us much about where it
comes from or how to use it – knowing, in this sense of the word, does not equal
doing (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2000). Furthermore, there is now good evidence
that Knowledge Management initiatives based solely on this kind of thinking
often fail (Walsham, 2002). For example, in an empirical study of an initiative to
encourage knowledge transfer in a world-wide bank, Newell et al. (2001) found
that the introduction of a Knowledge Management System – a global intranet –
designed to capture and share tacit knowledge across the organization had the
opposite effect to that intended by senior management. These problems will be
discussed further in Chapters 3 and 7.
These points of critique have led people to develop more sophisticated ‘con-
tingency’ frameworks that show us how strategies for managing knowledge can
be linked to specific aspects of the organizational tasks at hand. For example,
Hansen (1999) studied innovation in a large electronics company and concluded
that strong social relationships with a few people were beneficial for tasks that
required the transfer of complex, highly tacit knowledge, whereas weak rela-
tionships with many people were more effective where the knowledge involved
was less complex and more explicit. This approach is promising as it takes into
account purpose – that is what knowledge is to be used for. However it still,

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