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16 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

can identify some general insights that practice perspectives offer over and above
process perspectives to our understanding of knowledge work.
First, practice perspectives remind us that knowledge is ‘sticky’ – it sticks to
practice and is therefore difficult to share where peoples’ practices are also not
shared. This helps to explain why sharing knowledge across specialist functions
or disciplines within an organization, or from one organization to another,
is so difficult – even where people appreciate others’ ideas, they may not be
able to apply them because it would be too difficult to change their current
practices. This means that knowledge is not uniformly good but is actually
quite paradoxical in relation to organizational performance. On the one hand,
division of labour results in different groups performing different practices
which means that valuable specialized knowledge can develop. On the other
hand, the ‘knowledge boundaries’ created by specialization pose barriers to
knowledge sharing across different groups of practitioners (Brown and Duguid,
2001; Carlile, 2004; Scarbrough et al., 2004). As Carlile (2002) puts it:
the irony is that these knowledge boundaries are not only a critical challenge, but also
a perceptual necessity because much of what organizations produce has a foundation
in the specialization of different kinds of knowledge.
(Carlile, 2002, p. 442)
Second, when we perform practice we use many kinds of material and physical
objects, not just words and thoughts. Material objects are not just tools that
people use to achieve ends, however, they also set limits around what prac-
tices are actually possible. For example, Orlikowski (2007) describes an online
business meeting where laptop computers, Internet connections, phone lines,
cables, connectors, pens, mute buttons on telephones – in her terms, the ‘stuff’
of everyday life – serve to ‘scaffold’ the social activity of the people involved.
She uses the metaphor of ‘scaffolds’ to highlight the ways in which tempo-
rary material arrangements help constitute particular kinds of social activity in
real time. Practice perspectives on knowledge work draw attention, then, to
the ‘materiality’ of social activity (Orlikowski, 2007; Schatzki, 2001). In other
words they focus on the ways that all human activities, including knowledge
work, are interwoven with non-human, material artefacts, objects and physical
arrangements. While there is considerable debate around exactly how this inter-
weaving takes place (the importance of human versus non-human agency, being
a particular bone of contention – Latour, 1988), practice perspectives agree that
the social world is ‘a field of embodied, materially interwoven practices centrally
organized around shared practical understandings’ (Schatzki, 2001, p. 3).
This has important implications for managing knowledge work. On the one
hand, it means that the ability (or lack thereof) to transform knowledge and
innovate depends, at least to some extent, on what Schatzki (2001) describes as
the ‘solidifying inertia’ of material layouts (p. 3). Bicycles rely fundamentally on
the wheel and are still very much the same today as they were centuries ago, for
example. On the other hand, material objects (mobile technologies, drawings,
prototypes and so on) can also act as critical tools for Knowledge Management.

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