Knowledge management technology and the reproduction of knowledge work practices

B Bourdieu's Theory of Practice is adopted to illuminate work practices and their circuits of reproduction in a US-based, Fortune 500 manufacturing firm and explores how their situated practices were at odds with the generalized “gatekeeping” practices embedded in a knowledge management technology whose implementation they themselves were advocating.

Abstract

Organizations seeking ways to manage their knowledge assets are increasingly turning to information technology for solutions. As knowledge management systems are being developed and implemented, it behooves both practitioners and researchers to learn from the successes and failures of more established types of information systems including MIS and DSS. According to the Standish Group, the implementation success rate for these systems runs at around 30%. Many argue that these low success rates are, in part, attributable to technologists’ lack of understanding of the situated work practices of the systems’ user communities. This has lead to increasing calls for research on work practice in the field of Information Systems. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what is meant by work practice. Furthermore, the consideration of work practice outside of its circuit of reproduction can be misleading. By circuits of reproduction we mean the reciprocal relationships through which practice creates and recreates the objectified social structures and conditions in which it occurs. In this paper, we adopt Bourdieu's Theory of Practice to illuminate work practices and their circuits of reproduction. Relying on data that were collected during an eight-month ethnography of knowledge work practices in a US-based, Fortune 500 manufacturing firm, we focus on the situated “gatekeeping” practices of a group of competitive intelligence analysts and explore how their situated practices were at odds with the generalized “gatekeeping” practices embedded in a knowledge management technology whose implementation they themselves were advocating. We argue that their inability to see this incongruence until very late in the pilot implementation is associated with an understanding of their work practices in isolation, i.e. outside of their circuits of reproduction.