Knowing in practice: Enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing

By Wanda J. Orlikowski. STUDI ORGANIZZATIVI, 2002

2,845 citations recorded by the source corpus.

- In this paper, I outline a perspective on knowing in practice which highlights the essential role of human action In knowing how to get things done in complex organizational work. The perspective suggests that knowing is not a static embedded capability or stable disposition o\ actors, but rather an ongoing social accomplishment, constituted and reconstituted as actors engage the world in practice. In interpreting the findings of an empirical study conducted in a geographically dispersed hightech organization. I suggest that the competence to do global product development is both collective and distributed, grounded in the everyday practices of organizational members. I conclude by discussing some of the research implications of a perspective on organizational knowing in practice.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ae425d7b47092c5fa0dff087e894f5c296cadd5

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Citations in the corpus

What do we really mean by the dynamic dimension of intellectual capital (2007, methodology): “The crucial division here is between the static view of knowledge as a thing, disposition, or an outcome, and the dynamic view of knowledge as skilled task enactment (Polanyi, 1966; Blackler, 1995; Spender, 1996b; Orlikowski, 2002).”
The Dynamic Structure of Management Support Systems: Theory Development, Research Focus, and Direction (2007, background): “One of the greatest obstacles in managing organizational knowledge to achieve benefits is effectively capturing and incorporating soft data and tacit knowledge into the system (Nonaka 1994; Nylund 1999; Orlikowski 2002).”
Corporate Ecologies of Business Travel in Professional Service Firms (2009, neutral): “The " social cues " gained from embodied encounter are said to be vital but missing in the narrow social " bandwidth " environment of virtual communication technologies (see Lassen, 2006; Hildrum, 2007; Orlikowski, 2002).”
Learning to be a Qualitative Management Researcher (2009, background): “We would argue, therefore, that the production of high-quality qualitative research should be viewed as an ‘active accomplishment’ (Orlikowski, 2002: 270), where skills and knowledge only take on meaning through the lived practice of conducting qualitative research.”
Seeking Qualitative Rigor in Inductive Research (2013, background): “For examples of alternative approaches, see Eisenhardt (1989a, 1989b); Bechky (2003); Elsbach and Kramer (2003); Kreiner, Hollensbe, and Sheep (2006); Orlikowski (2002); Plowman et al. (2007); and Riley (1983).”
Dynamic Capabilities and Knowledge Management: an Integrative Role for Learning?* (2008, background): “And more speciﬁc organizational practices such as skill development, mentoring and reward systems are reported by Orlikowski (2002) as leading to the development of capabilities.”
Switching Hats: The Effect of Role Transition on Individual Ambidexterity (2019, background): “For individuals, however, striving to integrate different knowledge domains for ambidexterity requires an understanding and management of knowledge boundaries more than legal or structural demarcations (Carlile, 2004; Orlikowski, 2002).”
The firm as an epistemic community: The knowledge based view revisited (2010, result): “…1996, p. 13) contrasted with a parallel stream of research in the sociology of knowledge, which emphasized the practical aspects of knowledge (Blackler, 1995; Brown and Duguid, 1991, 1998, 2001a, 2001b; Dougherty, 1992; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Orlikowski, 2002; Tsoukas, 1996; Wenger, 1998).”
Beyond Collective Entities: Multilevel Research on Organizational Routines and Capabilities (2011, background): “…on how internal and external networks affect workplace performance (Mehra, Kilduff, & Brass, 2001), the emergence of organizational knowledge (Orlikowski, 2002), and innovation and technology (Obstfeld, 2005; Pentland & Feldman, 2007) suggest fruitful avenues to extend network analysis to…”
Balancing global and local strategic contexts: expatriate knowledge transfer, applications, and learning within a transnational organization (2007, background): “In contrast, the knowledge accessed from more remote locations plays little or no part in the situated learning process because it lacks sufficient contextual relevance (Argote & Ingram, 2000; Nonaka, 1994; Orlikowski, 2002).”
Combining Critical Reflection and Design Thinking to Develop Integrative Learners (2013, background): “Learning is an enacted capability, a situated and ongoing accomplishment that emerges from everyday actions (Orlikowski, 2002; Reynolds, 1998; Schon, 1983).”
Intellectual Capital Architectures and Ambidextrous Learning: A Framework for Human Resource Management (2009, background): “Much of this discussion is supported in the extant literature on organizational ‘improvisation’, (Cook & Brown, 1999; Hargadon & Fanelli, 2002; Orlikowski, 2002).”
Understanding the Role of Objects in Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration (2012, background): “Thus we follow the advice of authors such as Orlikowski (2002) who suggest that the work performed by objects becomes apparent only when we focus on how experts from various disciplines collaborate in practice, starting from the premise that cross-disciplinary collaboration is a social…”