Management Learning

The ubiquity of information makes it easy to overlook the local character of innovative knowledge. Nowhere is this local character more overlooked yet paradoxically more evident than in Silicon Valley. The Valley persists as a densely interconnected innovative region, though its inhabitants loudly proclaim that the information technology they develop renders distance dead and place insignificant. It persists, we argue, because of the local character of innovative knowledge, which flows in social rather than digital networks. The locality of innovative knowledge highlights the challenge of developing other regions for the modern economy. Should these abandon traditional local strengths and strive to become another Silicon Valley? Or should they concentrate on their traditional strengths and rely on Silicon Valley and the other established high-tech regions to provide the necessary technology to survive in the digital age? We argue that they should do neither, but instead develop new technologies in service of their existing competencies and needs. Finding new ways to address indigenous problems is the right way, we believe, to tie to the region expertise, talent, and capital that might otherwise be lost to the lure of existing high-tech clusters.

This study of business process reengineering within a UK hospital engages with the following phenomena of interest to organizational scholars and practitioners: corporate change programmes; new forms of organizing; and knowledge processes in and around organizations. A hospital change programme is conceptualized here as a form of knowledge management whereby organizational leaders used business process reengineering in an attempt to effect changed organizational arrangements and performance. Utilizing Cook and Brown's distinction between knowledge and knowing, the article observes shifts in the ambition, organization and practice of the reengineering programme over time. Data linking the process and performance of the reengineering programme suggest that viewing reengineering, and other best practice concepts, as objective transferable knowledge resources is of limited theoretical and practical utility. Rather, the encounter between reengineering as `off-the shelf' prescription and the hospital setting reveals the interaction between `knowledge' and `knowing' to be a social process more subject to politicized relations and arrangements than presently theorized. Thus the study promotes a more socialized view of knowledge management and greater links between contemporary developments in theorizing about organizational change, learning and knowledge processes. Other observations emanating from the study are that greater attention needs to be given to assumptions of knowledge transfer and use within debate about best-practice concepts and corporate change programmes. Possibilities for transforming organizations to effect new organizational form and process are also theorized as more complex than some contemporary writing suggests.

This article explores some of the constraints on the development of knowledge through a multi-perspective examination of a project where there was an intention, and enacted process, to develop knowledge. Building on prior work in the fields of knowledge and knowledge management, the article is engaged with the generic question of what the conditions that facilitate knowledge creation in organizations are. However, the approach adopted here is not to focus on success stories, but to develop an understanding of constraining factors through an examination of an example of apparent failure and the absence of new knowledge. A detailed multi-perspective exploration of a particular organizational episode is provided. Data from this episode are considered from three theoretical perspectives: psychodynamics, social construction and complexity theory. This multi-perspective exploration highlights the need for conflict in organizational settings where new knowledge is at least supposed to be being developed.

Communities of practice have been identified as playing a critical role in the promotion of learning and innovation in organizations. Yet, while innovation may be facilitated within communities of practice, radical innovations frequently occur at the interstices across communities. Here, the performative advantages of communities of practice are less clear. Moreover, while it has been suggested that managers play a critical role in constructing, aligning or supporting communities of practice, there is little empirical evidence for these assertions. This article contributes to these debates on the construction of communities of practice and their role in the innovation process. It does this through a case study of a radical innovation for the treatment of prostate cancer. The case focuses on Medico-the company that manufactured a product for the new treatment-and explores attempts by managers to construct a new `community of practice' as a vehicle for innovation. While the case highlights attempts by managers to construct communities as `social objects', it also underlines the shift in management strategies and practices associated with such a construction. Faced with powerful professions, and limited organizational support, managers employed a strategy centred on constructing a community focused on the disease (rather than the product) using `community of practice' as a rhetorical device to enrol key professionals and to mobilize and legitimize changes in work practice. Thus community building reflected managers' lack of power to intensify innovation by other means.

Current theories of organizational learning that emphasize knowledge creation and transformation assume, but fail to problematize, the justification of belief in new knowledge, although they admit it is an essential enabling condition for the dissemination and integration of innovative ideas and practices into organizational practice. The present article aims to correct this imbalance by (1) developing a theoretical framework for the study of organizational justification of belief, and (2) reporting on an empirical study of the processes by which quality management progressively became accepted as a solution to the economic problems encountered by enterprise during the decade of the 1980s. Grounded in a constructivist view of knowledge, we demonstrate that what Nonaka and Takeuchi refer to as a managerial intention is in fact the product of a process of learning, involving the play of both external and internal influences, channeled through the continuing association and disassociation of interests that reflect the communities of practice and discourse that are typical of every complex organization. Justification of belief is thus both a social and a rhetorical accomplishment, whose outcome is a priori unpredictable.