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84 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

synergistic effects, also emphasizes some of the problems of developing and sus-
taining collaborative working – problems which are frequently overlooked in
prescriptive accounts of the benefits of team-working for knowledge creation.
There is now an extensive literature on the problems that can occur when peo-
ple work together in teams. This dates back to very early work by Ringlemann
(1913), who found that for some tasks (e.g. tug-of-war games) there was a
reduction in individual effort as the number of people engaged in a collabora-
tive task increased. So in a tug-of-war situation, the more people there are on
each side the less effort does each individual actually exert. This is sometimes
referred to as the social-loafing phenomenon and has been found to be more
common where individual contribution to the team effort cannot be easily iden-
tified (Latene et al., 1979). At the present time there is a whole list of team-
working problems or phenomena that can be cited from the literature. We now
consider several that are pertinent to knowledge sharing and knowledge creation
in teams.

Knowledge boundaries
Perhaps the most prominent obstacle inhibiting the sharing of knowledge across
a multi-disciplinary team is created by knowledge itself! The seminal work, that
helps us to understand how knowledge can itself be a barrier to knowledge shar-
ing, is by Paul Carlile (2002, 2004). Carlile develops a framework which depicts
three kinds of knowledge boundary – syntactic, semantic and pragmatic – and
which also indicates that for these different boundaries to be overcome, knowl-
edge must be transferred, translated and transformed, respectively, as described
below (see Figure 4.1). Given these knowledge boundaries, Carlile identifies
boundary objects as an important means for facilitating the sharing of knowl-
edge across specialist knowledge domains (Star and Griesemer, 1989). Boundary
objects can be either concrete objects (e.g. a blue-print, a drawing, a prototype)
or abstract concepts (e.g. a vision, a symbol), but their common and defining
characteristic is that they contain some ‘interpretative flexibility’ (Bijker et al.,

Increasing
novelty Pragmatic boundary: Knowledge transformation

Semantic boundary: Knowledge translation
Syntactic boundary: Knowledge transfer
Known

Context Knowledge boundary Knowledge process

Figure 4.1 Framework for managing knowledge across boundaries

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