Home | Browse | Search | Credits | About
Register | User Area | DL-Harvest | Help
DLIST

Who killed the knowledge analysts? A short history of Knowledge Working (KW) in a public sector agency

Davenport, Elizabeth and Rasmussen, Louise (2006) Who killed the knowledge analysts? A short history of Knowledge Working (KW) in a public sector agency.

Full text available as:
PDF - Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or other PDF viewer.

Abstract

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006". The paper is one of a series by the authors that seeks to explain conflicts and contradictions in knowledge management discourse in organisations. The paper presents a study of knowledge networking within a public sector agency (PSA), where a number of knowledge management initiatives have been introduced since the inception of the UK ‘Modernising government’ programme of 1999. The study involves an observant participant (Czarniawska, 2001), as one of the authors has worked in the organisation as a Knowledge Analyst (‘KA’). The case is an interesting one as it explicates the social and material consequences of a number of utopian KM visions that inspired senior managers in the organisation. For seven years (1999-2006), PSA maintained a knowledge network (the ‘Knowledge Working’ (KW) initiative) across its 12 local subsidiary companies – the network was unstable, both a source and an outcome of discursive contests. Our study explores the life and death of this discourse formation, and its associated subject, the KA. A comparable study of a public agency was undertaken by Carter and Scarbrough in 2001, one of several that constitute a research agenda based on the work of Foucault (e.g. 1975) in Information Systems Research recently reviewed by Willcocks (2006). Following Schulze and Stabell, (2004), we identified five main discourse elements: ‘value’, ‘psychology’, ‘object’, ‘practice’ and ‘structure’. These elements have been used to analyse field data gathered in the past 3 years.

EPrint Type:Extended Abstract
Subjects:Social Informatics
ID Code:1478
Deposited On:19 September 2006
Eprint Statistics:View statistics for this eprint
Tell A Colleague:Tell a colleague about it.

Czarniawska, B. (2001). On Time, Space, and Action Nets. International Conference on Spacing and Timing: Rethinking Globalization and Standardization, Palermo, Italy.

Carter, C. and Scarbrough, H. (2001). Regimes of knowledge: stories of power: a treatise on knowledge management. Creativity and innovation management, 10(3), 210-220.

Foucault, Michel (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage.

Hall, S. (2001). Foucault: power, knowledge and discourse. In M. Wetherell, S.Taylor and S. Yates. Discourse theory and practice: a reader. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 72 - 81.

Schultze, U. and C. Stabell (2004). Knowing What You Don't Know? Discourses and Contradictions in KM Research. Journal of Management Studies 41(4): 449-573.

Thrift, N. Knowing Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Willcocks, L.P. (2006) Michel Foucault in the social study of ICTs: critique and reappraisal. Department of Information Systems Working Paper Series, 138. London: London School of Economics and Political Science.

Clemmons Rumizen, M. (2002). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Knowledge Management. Indianapolis, USA, CWL Publishing Enterprises.

Commentary/Response Threads

EPrints dLIST, an open access archive for the Information Sciences, is supported by the School of Information Resources and Library Science and Learning Technologies Center, University of Arizona. Established in 2002, dLIST has a global Advisory Board and is a part of the Information Technology & Society Research Lab. Open Archives
Contact: Admin | Donate