Communities of Practice and the Role of Location: Revealing Limits of Virtuality and Knowledge

Communities of practice provide a lens for understanding how knowledge develops and flows in organizations. This perspective highlights how, as a result of shared practice, knowledge flows more easily within a community than across community boundaries. Most prior empirical studies identify communities of practice whose members have similar occupations and thus emphasize knowledge boundaries that are congruent with occupational boundaries. In this paper, we argue that location also shapes practice and thus plays a critical role in defining knowledge boundaries. We use a case from a multinational organization to show that the common work practices, perspectives, and knowledge operational within one organizational location were not shared by employees at other locations. We suggest that, by reemphasizing the often overlooked unity of work, knowledge, and identity existing among functionally diverse, collocated organizational members, while simultaneously drawing attention to knowledge differences emerging between functionally similar members in different locations, this use of the communities of practice lens reveals the limits of virtuality when knowledge creation is at stake

Coping with Rapid Change: The Case of the Dutch Social Security System

The preliminary findings presented in this paper are based on current research conducted by the two authors of this paper. The aim of the empirical research is to study how Local Social Securities (LSSs) in the Netherlands deal with translating changing legislation and policies into software that impacts the provision of social security services. Since there does not exist sufficient theoretical knowledge on this issue from which to derive hypotheses, the research is exploratory and mainly inductive. By studying the social dynamics in depth, our aim is to uncover new findings about information systems development (ISD). Such insight is conceptually relevant as it should contribute to the existing middle range theories of ISD. It also has practical value since the framework presented in the paper can be used by actors in the field of information system (IS) management as a tool to analyze and evaluate coping strategies employed by IS departments also facing turbulent environments. To our knowledge, there has not been an attempt to gain a comprehensive understanding of how IS departments cope with or might cope with situations of rapidly changing environments. Such research is worthwhile because managing change is relevant to every organization dealing with information systems, and is crucial to those which experience rapidly changing environments

Learning from the Environment: Exploring the Relationship Between Organizational Learning, Knowledge Management and Information/Communication Technology

The aim of the paper is to contribute to the ongoing discussion on Organizational Learning (OL) and Knowledge Management (KM). We will do this by focusing on a specific domain of OL: ‘external learning’ or the exchange of knowledge between organizations. In general, KM is seen as a method organizations and managers can use to improve the knowledge within the organization. Surprisingly less attention is given to the way KM might improve the knowledge that is being exchanged and created between the organization and the environment

Exploring the virtual space of academia

The aim of this chapter is to provide a view on how researchers present themselves in a social network specifically developed for supporting academic practices, how they share information and engage in dialogues with colleagues worldwide. We analysed data from 30,428 users who have registered on a publicly available website to study the effect of academic position, university ranking and country on people's behaviour. Results suggest that the virtual network closely mirrors physical reality, reproducing the same hierarchical structure imposed by position, ranking, and country on user behaviour. Despite the potential for bridging and bonding social capital the networks have not achieved substantial changes in structures and practices of the academic context. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the need of finding new strategies to motivate the users to contribute to the community and support equal participation, as so far the community is mainly exploited as a static website

Make way for the algorithms: symbolic actions and change in a regime of knowing

When actors deem technological change undesirable, they may act symbolically by pretending to comply while avoiding real change. In our study of the introduction of an algorithmic technology in a sales organization, we found that such symbolic conformity led unintendedly to the full implementation of the suggested technological change. To explain this surprising outcome we advance a regime-of-knowing lens that helps to analyze deep challenges happening ‘under the surface’ during the process of technology introduction. A regime of knowing guides what is worth knowing, what actions matter to acquire this knowledge, and who has the authority to make decisions around those issues. We found that both the technologists who introduced the algorithmic technology, as well as the incumbent workers whose work was affected by the change, used symbolic actions to either defend the established regime of knowing or to advocate a radical change. While the incumbent workers enacted symbolic conformity by pretending to comply with suggested changes, the technologists performed symbolic advocacy by presenting a positive side of the technological change. Ironically, because the symbolic conformity enabled and was reinforced by symbolic advocacy, reinforcing cycles of symbolic actions yielded a radical change in the sales' regime of knowing: from one focused on a deep understanding of customers via personal contact and strong relationships, to one based upon model predictions from the processing of large datasets. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for the introduction of technology at work and for knowing in the workplace.Cambridge Judge Business School internal gran

Debating big data: A literature review on realizing value from big data

This is the final version. Available on open access from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordBig data has been considered to be a breakthrough technological development over recent years. Notwithstanding, we have as yet limited understanding of how organizations translate its potential into actual social and economic value. We conduct an in-depth systematic review of IS literature on the topic and identify six debates central to how organizations realize value from big data, at different levels of analysis. Based on this review, we identify two socio-technical features of big data that influence value realization: portability and interconnectivity. We argue that, in practice, organizations need to continuously realign work practices, organizational models, and stakeholder interests in order to reap the benefits from big data. We synthesize the findings by means of an integrated model