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INTRODUCTION 23

Taking a more critical approach, it is important that we continue to ask ques-
tions about the extent to which these changes have been as widespread, or as
inherently positive, as predicted by the likes of Drucker or Gibbons et al. As
we have seen, in some types of work – call centres being an example – there is
little evidence of workers being freed from hierarchy or being actively engaged
in using their own knowledge as a means of production. New web-based and
increasingly mobile technologies also, clearly, create their own problems. On
the one hand, they can decentralize work and free people and activities from
the constraints of physical location or even identity. At the same time, however,
they can depersonalize the experience of work, generating problems of social
isolation, or can intensify it by shifting home–work life balance. They can also
increase opportunities for more subtle forms of surveillance and control.
Positive or negative, however, the changes heralded by the ‘Information
Age’ are undoubtedly having a visible impact on the way organizations are
being structured. Many have indeed shifted away from the traditional com-
mand and control structures of Taylor’s time (the classic bureaucracy) towards
flatter, decentralized structures and more flexible, open-ended, fluid and net-
worked arrangements (see Chapter 3). If we look at high-technology sectors
such as the biopharmaceutical industry, for example, we see this characterized
by loose constellations of firms, alliances and mergers, outsourcing and part-
nering arrangements, licensing deals and so forth. The rise of networked orga-
nizations (sometimes referred to as polycentric organizations), virtual modes
of organizing, and more open-ended, collaborative forms of innovation and
product development (Chesbrough, 2004) illustrate further the extent to
which organizational structures have evolved in pace with changes in technol-
ogy that break down traditional boundaries of time and space.
These changes in structure have, however, generated new problems for man-
aging knowledge in the current era that are equally, if not more, significant than
those experienced in Taylor’s time. For example, when outsourcing is introduced,
or mergers take place, the implications in terms of ‘losing’ valuable knowledge are
often not recognized until it is too late. More open-ended, collaborative arrange-
ments for organizing work and product development also generate significant
challenges in terms of who owns intellectual property (Chesbrough, 2003a, b).
And, when businesses are restructured around virtual teams and networks, and
stretched across time and space, they also inevitably lose opportunities for casual
sharing of knowledge and learning invited by physical proximity. As Prusak put
it (1997):
If the water cooler was a font of useful knowledge in the traditional firm, what con-
stitutes a virtual one.
(p. xiii)

Indeed, it has been suggested that in fact one of the reasons that Knowledge
Management initiatives became so popular in the late 1990s was because they
offered an antidote to some of the profound organizational problems posed
by these changes of organization in the ‘Information Age’. The emphasis in

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