Lawrence Erlbaum.

Lawrence Erlbaum.

Collins, Randall 1981 "On the microfoundations of macrosociology." American Journal of Sociology, 86: 984-1013

Cyert Richard M and James G March 1963 A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Dewey, John 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. strange York: Holt. It is commonplace to ascribe knowledge to organizations, to assert that organizations display adequate income have memory, and can learn. on the other hand what, exactly, do we mean when we use mentalistic expressions like mind, memory, knowledge, and learning to describe organizations? This question is just beginning to receive attention in the organizational literature (Sandelands and Stablein, 1987; Walsh and Ungson 1991) single approach has been to explore cognition in particular domains, like as strategic management (e.g., Salancik and Porac, 1986; Jackson and Dutton, 1988; Porac and Thomas, 1990; Lyle and Schwenk, 1992) The cognitive approach is a natural offshoot of the information-processing model of organizations (Galbraith, 1977) and is consistent with orthodox conceptions of knowledge in philosophy and cognitive science, which equate knowledge with abstract representation (Rorty, 1979) Another approach has been to concentrate forward organizational structures, such as routines (eg Duncan and Weiss, 1979; Nelson and Winter, 1982; Levitt and March, 1988) The structural view gives the insight that the capacity of the organization to act hangs on things that are ofttimes tacit or systemic, apart from any explicit representation.

These sum of two units approaches---the cognitive and the structural--are reminiscent of the mind-body distinction in classical philosophy that Ryle (1949: 15-16) called "the dogma of the spirit in the Machine." The cognitive approach directs our attention to the ghost: perception, understanding making, and belief. The structural approach directs our attention to the machine: ends structures, and routines. This paper furnishs a different approach, based onward sociological theories of practice (Bourdieu, 1977 1990; Lave, 1988) In a nutshell, the idea is that knowledge is neither phantom nor machine but consists of situated performance or praxis. This definition of knowledge has sources in American pragmatism (Dewey, 1938; James, 1963; Mead, 1964) and similar definitions have been used by the agency of contemporary philosophers and social theorists to attack the classic mind-body dualisms that pervade Western deliberation (Rorty, 1979; Bernstein, 1983). The organizational literature has had occasional glimmers of pragmatism (Seely Brown and Duguid, 1991) however in general, our theorizing has been restricted to the traditional categories. The design of this paper is to hint a way to overcome this dualism in organizational research. In the same way that Ryle (1949) argued that "knowledge" fitly refers to certain kinds of individual performances, I will argue that "organizational knowledge" fitly refers to certain kinds of organizational performances.

The argument is based forward an examination of how collective, knowledgeable performances are accomplished in software support touchy lines. Most vendors of commercial software give telephone-based hot-line services to assist customers with technical moot points When a customer calls a passionate line with a question or a question the support specialist who takes the call is responsible for providing a certain quantity of kind of answer or solution. Individual support specialists, however, frequently lack the personal resources necessary to be agreeable to to a given call. Unles support specialists can in some way draw on other resources of the organization from getting help or transferring the call to someone besides the organization's collective performance as a software support irascible line will not seem extremely knowledgeable. This is essentially Ryle's (1949) argument: Unles an organization (or more precisely, its members) can somehow or other create a satisfactory performance, we are not justified in making an attribution of knowledge to that organization.

I began this research with the assumption that knowledge in a software support of high temperature line was best thought of as a kind of database that a customer could access at dialing his or her phone The database metaphor separates the knowledge from the machine that stores and retrieves it; it objectifies organizational knowledge as something distinct from the organization. From the dualist position, this makes entire sense: Knowledge is the departed spirit that somehow animates the machine. Six month of participant observation in sum of two units hot lines forced me to reconsider this perspective. I began to view organizational knowledge in terms of members' performances and the structural features of the organization that enable or constrain those performances. In many prizes this perspective is similar to March and Simon's (1958:141-150) universal of "performance programs," In' which the customer's question provides the environmental stimulus, and the organizational reply is constructed from among a constrained establish of possibilities. But March and Simon (1958) did not make the pragmatic connection between performance and knowledge, and they were curiously silent forward the question of how these programs are embodied or signifyed in real organizations. My goal in this paper is to articulate a pragmatic theory of organizational knowledge using the relevant literature and the data I mustered and to show how the performances of members are related to the structural features of the organization.