Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of Understanding on a Production Floor

Abstract

This paper suggests that knowledge is shared in organizations through the transformation of occupational communities' situated understandings of their work. In this paper, I link the misunderstandings between engineers, technicians, and assemblers on a production floor to their work contexts, and demonstrate how members of these communities overcome such problems by cocreating common ground that transforms their understanding of the product and the production process. In particular, I find that the communities' knowledge-sharing difficulties are rooted in differences in their language, the locus of their practice, and their conceptualization of the product. When communication problems arise, if members of these communities provide solutions which invoke the differences in the work contexts and create common ground between the communities, they can transform the understandings of others and generate a richer understanding of the product and the problems they face.

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

“…Taking a practice lens on strategy guided us to focus on the everyday activities of managers making strategy in situ, much as Orlikowski (1992Orlikowski ( , 2000, Barley (1986), Bechky (2003) and others have done in the context of understanding technology in organizations. A practice lens recognizes that practice is a central locus of organizing, and it is through situated and recurrent activities that organizational consequences are produced and become reinforced or changed over time (Feldman and Orlikowski 2011).…”

The Two Facets of Collaboration: Cooperation and Coordination in Strategic Alliances

“…The institutional school of thought on coordination suggests that coordination failure can be avoided not just by means of formal and explicit rules, but also by means of informal norms and implicit assumptions derived from broad societal institutions (DiMaggio, 1997) or more industry-, profession-, or organization-specific institutions (Bechky, 2003;Cooper, Hinings, Greenwood, & Brown, 1996;Cooper, Rose, Greenwood, & Hinings, 2000;Tilcsik, 2010). These cultural influences can inform individuals' perceptions of task interdependencies (Steensma, Marino, Weaver, & Dickson, 2000) and their interpretation of the level and impact of external uncertainties (Daft & Weick, 1984).…”

Knowledge Gathering, Team Capabilities, and Project Performance in Challenging Work Environments

“…These social perspectives are complemented by research on knowledge management technologies such as electronic database systems (e.g., Hansen and Haas 2001) and communication innovations from e-mail to teleconferencing (e.g., Sproull and Kiesler 1991), as well on research on the cognitive and motivational factors that facilitate learning such as the absorptive capacity of a firm (Cohen and Levinthal 1991) or the psychological safety of a work unit (Edmondson 1999). With the exception of some recent ethnographic studies (e.g., Carlile 2002, Bechky 2003, Patriotta 2003, however, studies of knowledge gathering generally overlook the distinctive problems faced by teams in environments characterized by overload, ambiguity, and politics. Yet even if teams manage to gather knowledge successfully, the benefits of gathering that knowledge may be limited by such problems, especially if the teams lack the capabilities to handle these problems effectively.…”