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230 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

>> INTRODUCTION
We have seen in previous chapters that the attempt to ‘manage knowledge’ within
organizations is not new. Indeed, if we go back to traditional craft industries,
young people entering an industry learnt their trade by serving an apprenticeship.
This was effectively a system of managing knowledge that involved watching and
learning from a skilled craftsperson. While the apprenticeship system left the
knowledge and skill with the individual craftspeople, Taylor’s Scientific Man-
agement was a break from tradition in that it attempted to separate decision-
making from practice. As we saw in Chapter 1, Taylor wanted managers to have
the knowledge about how, why and when to carry out the various production
activities in order to maximize productivity – to be the ‘brains’. Workers were
to be simply the ‘hands’. To some extent this approach is still prevalent today
in jobs and industries based on a mass production and mass consumption phi-
losophy. So a worker in a fast-food restaurant is following a set of clearly defined
procedures in making a hamburger, and a person working in a call centre is
following a script in responding to a customer enquiry. In both cases, where a
customer requires a service that falls outside the defined procedures the worker,
in principal at least, is not equipped to deal with this situation. Indeed, if they
did attempt to service the customer by ignoring standard procedures they would
likely be reprimanded.
Such an approach to managing work may well still be appropriate in some
jobs and in some industries. However, as we saw in Chapter 7 and the case of
BankCo, divorcing knowledge from concrete tasks and actions (i.e. the brain
from the hands) risks major problems. While Scientific Management spread
rapidly from the car industry into other mass-production industries before and
after the Second World War, the years since the 1970s have seen managers in
many industries – including the car industry itself – realize the limitations of
this approach. This realization was stimulated by the success of Japanese forms
of work organization such as quality circles, ‘just-in-time’ and ‘lean’ produc-
tion which made much greater use of the tacit knowledge of the shop-floor
workforce – knowledge which even the most rigorous kinds of Scientific Man-
agement had been unable to eliminate.
Moreover, as we saw in early chapters, the environment in which the major-
ity of industry sectors operate is increasingly dynamic, knowledge-intensive and
globalized. Organizations need to respond rapidly to such environments, using
knowledge to develop new and innovative products, services and organizational
processes to suit changing circumstances. To seek to concentrate decision-
making power and authority in the managerial technostructure, while the major
part of the organization simply obeys its commands, is slow and cumbersome.
Worse, it ignores the extent to which much of the most valuable knowledge
within the organizational domain simply cannot be concentrated at the cen-
tre. Very often, the employees who are closest to the rapidly changing business
environment are not the managers, but the rank-and-file sales people, produc-
tion operatives and so on. It is their experience built up over time with the

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