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14 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

fundamentally, sees knowledge as a thing or commodity that is valuable for its
own sake and tells us relatively little about the processes involved in creating and
using knowledge across contexts.

>> PROCESS AND PRACTICE PERSPECTIVES:
KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWING
The failure of many initiatives that have attempted to ‘capture’ and ‘trans-
fer’ individuals’ knowledge have helped fuel shifts towards accounts that take
as their focus the development of processes and enabling contexts capable of
supporting knowledge work. This shift can be seen in organization theories
which focus on ‘knowing’ as a social and organizational activity, in contrast to
‘knowledge’, as a thing or object. Process, and more recently practice, perspec-
tives draw, then, from an epistemology of practice (outlined above – Cook and
Brown, 1999).
Our working definition of knowledge – as the ability to discriminate within
and across contexts – is based on this processual perspective in that it avoids
notions of ‘truth’ and defines knowledge in dynamic terms as a practice of mak-
ing distinctions (Tsoukas and Vladimirou, 2001). Process approaches to manag-
ing knowledge work draw from theoretical traditions of ‘social constructivism’,
seeing knowledge, or knowing, as a process of ‘sensemaking’, whereby actors
interacting within particular social contexts come to negotiate understandings of
the world (Berger and Luckman, 1967; Weick, 2001). Knowledge is, therefore:

• equivocal (subject to different meanings and interpretations);
• dynamic (accepted meanings can change as actors and contexts change) and;
• context-dependent (diffi cult, if not impossible, to separate from the context
in which it is produced).

While structural approaches see a direct relationship between increased
knowledge, knowledge transfer and organizational performance (Amidon,
1998), process approaches view this relationship as socially and politically
mediated. Whether or not knowledge (or knowing) leads to improvement
depends, then, on how tasks, actors and contexts come together (Clark and
Staunton, 1989). For example, Clark (2003) describes how the US game of
American Football originated from knowledge of the game of rugby in the
United Kingdom. However, it was not simply a case of capturing knowledge
about rugby and transferring this to the United States. His historical analy-
sis showed how key stakeholders (including players, sports promoters and
the media) reinterpreted the British rules of the game and created ‘pivotal
modifications’ that allowed it to be adapted to the particular context in the
United States at the time. Hence, in order to generate advertising revenue
through media breaks, they introduced shorter ‘periods’ (instead of halves)
and ‘time-outs’.

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