Andrew Hargadon and Angelo Fanelli
At
times knowledge can be seen as the source of organizational innovation and change-at
other times, however, it can be the very constraint on that change. This
conflicted role offers in- sights into why the phenomenon of organizational
knowledge has been interpreted by researchers in multiple and possibly conflicting
ways. Some theories depict knowledge as an empirical phenomenon, residing in
action and becoming "organizational" in the acquisition, diffusion,
and replication of those actions throughout the organization. Others consider
it a latent phenomenon, residing in the possibility for constructing novel organizational
actions. This paper argues that while each of these qualities-empirical and latent-are
intrinsic to knowledge in organizations, our understanding of organizational
phenomena is essentially incomplete until the relationship between them is
considered. Building on structuration theory, we propose a complementary
perspective that views organizational knowledge as the product of an ongoing and
recursive interaction between empirical and latent knowledge, between knowledge
as action and knowledge as possibility. We ground this complementary model of knowledge
in evidence from the field study of two firms whose innovation practices
provide unique insights into how knowledge simultaneously enables and
constrains behavior in organizations. We then discuss how a complementary
perspective avoids the reification of knowledge by depicting it instead as an ongoing
and social process and offers an alternative distinction between individual and
collective knowledge.
(Knowledge
Management; Organizational Learning; Innovation; Structuration Theory)
