Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Conceptualizing Knowledge Sharing and IT

This section draws on the literature review and specifically Schultze and Boland’s (2000b) work on narrative to develop a conceptual framework (Figure 5.1) pertaining to the ways in which knowledge is shared through ITs such as groupware and the intranet (Zack, 1999a). This comprises ongoing acting (practice) and accounting (textual narratives) processes.

Figure 5.1 Acting and Accounting Processes

Schultze and Boland’s (2000b) study of US Company found that new work arrangements arose due to the reliance on the use of IT to work across spatial, temporal, and functional boundaries. They described how these new work practices required employees to perform dual ‘acting’ and ‘accounting’ processes. Acting involved employees undertaking their work (in their case IT consultancy activities which involved fixing machines and developing new applications) and accounting processes required them to record a narrative of their practice by making explicit their activities and views on the various shared discussion forums and lessons learned databases that cut across the organization’s spatial, temporal, and functional boundaries. Based on this insight, acting and accounting can be conceived as comprising of three ongoing processes, sense making, sense giving, and sense reading.

Sense making is akin to what Schultze and Boland (2000b) refer to as an ‘out ...