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NEW ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS THAT SUPPORT KNOWLEDGE WORK 69

vided a clear pathway for communication. In the newer, flatter, organizational
forms, there are potentially more opportunities for knowledge to be lost or
reinvented in new contexts. So, knowledge is lost between BU, between orga-
nizations involved in inter-organizational alliances, across projects and across
geographical locations. Moreover, since hierarchies have been flattened, there
are fewer middle managers left who can act as intermediaries and try to coordi-
nate and provide a communication link across these boundaries.
In traditional bureaucratic structures, control and information exchange were
achieved by having each manager in the hierarchy only responsible for a small
number of subordinates. Managers thus had a relatively narrow ‘span of control’
and were able to closely supervise and control their subordinates. They would
then pass on information about their section to the manager above, who also had
a narrow span of control. With the flattening of organizational structures, the span
of control of each manager in the organizational hierarchy is much greater. So,
while in the past a manager may have supervised only seven to ten subordinates,
today they may be supervising 50–60 or even more. In this situation it is not pos-
sible to know what each subordinate is actually doing and to closely control and
monitor their activities. The subordinates must therefore control their own activi-
ties to a much larger extent. They are empowered to make their own decisions.
As seen in the previous chapter, this is entirely appropriate for knowledge
work and knowledge workers, which cannot be tightly controlled and organized.
However, it does mean that middle managers may struggle to act as the commu-
nication conduits within an organization (the knowledge intermediaries) – they
do not know in much detail what is happening within their particular sphere of
responsibility nor do they necessarily have time to engage in such information
gathering activities. It is not surprising, then, that often other intermediaries
(consultants, for example) will be brought in to conduct this intermediary work.
Thus we can see how new organizational forms create challenges for knowledge
work (especially with regards coordination) – challenges that can themselves gen-
erate new opportunities for knowledge work and knowledge workers. Indeed,
it has been suggested that the rise of Business Process Reengineering in the late
1980s/early 1990s – where organizations were flattened and streamlined around
business processes – acted as an important precursor for the following fad in
Knowledge Management in the mid-1990s (Scarbrough and Swan, 2001).
Organizations have, in essence, become so stretched and virtual that impor-
tant opportunities for face-to-face social interaction have been lost. So, in a
situation where knowledge is seen as perhaps the most valuable resource of a com-
pany, organizational forms have been developed to nurture knowledge creation.
However, these very same organizational forms that help to nurture knowledge
creation also provide more opportunity for knowledge loss. ‘Knowledge Man-
agement’ initiatives can be seen as an attempt to resolve this paradox (although
it should also be noted that the spread or diffusion of Knowledge Management
initiatives has also been promoted by a ‘bandwagon’ effect). We discuss these
topics in Chapter 7, when we look specifically at Knowledge Management sys-
tems as well as Enterprise Systems, both of which are described as systems that

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