Communication in knowledge intensive firms involves perspective making and perspective taking within and between their communities of knowing. In this paper we look to science as an example of knowledge work in a community of knowing, and draw implications for the design of electronic communication systems and policies to support perspective making and perspective taking. The role of narrative in perspective making and of reflexivity in perspective taking are highlighted. Two models of communication, the conduit model and the language games model, are proposed for guiding the design of electronic communication media, and their relative strengths and weaknesses are considered.

Cognition in organizations is a distributed phenomenon, in which individual members of an organization reflect upon their experience, make plans, or take action. Organizational learning or organizational cognition are familiar terms, but it is only the individual persons in an organization who create interpretations and test understandings, as they think and learn in their organizational setting. Coordinated outcomes emerge in organizations when individuals think and act in ways that take others in the organization and their interdependencies into account. We argue that much of the effort to design information technology to support cognition in organizations has not addressed its distributed quality. Such systems have tended to focus either on the individual as an isolated decision maker, or on the group as a producer of a decision or policy statement in common. In distributed cognition, by contrast, the group is a set of autonomous agents who act independently yet recognize that they have interdependencies. To guide the design of information technology, we propose that distributed cognition be viewed as a hermeneutic process of inquiry, emphasizing the importance of individual interpretation and group dialogue. Hermeneutics provides a theory of the interpretive process through which an individual gives meaning to organizational experience. Inquiry systems provide a theory of how a community of inquirers build and test knowledge representations through dialogue. Together, hermeneutics and inquiry systems are used to propose a set of design principles to guide the development of information technology that supports distributed cognition. The design principles we describe in the paper are ownership, easy travel, multiplicity, indeterminacy, emergence and mixed forms. Applications of information technology which embody these design principles would support distributed cognition by assisting individuals in making interpretations of their situation, reflecting on them, and engaging in dialogue about them with others. The objective is to refine their own understanding of the situation and better appreciate the understandings of others, enabling them to better take their interdependencies into account in their individual actions. A project to develop such a system is discussed, along with some implications for research.

Utilizing a grounded-theory approach, this study examines 8 organizations and finds that social networks make a difference in the capability of organizations to implement fundamental organizational change. Specifically, this study examines whether networks enable the learning required for local units to develop the new schemata—understandings, behaviors, and interaction patterns—required to adopt and appropriate planned organization-wide change. A mixture of organization-wide and local learning networks in organizations successfully implemented change, whereas the unsuccessful organizations relied primarily on hierarchical change implementation networks. In accelerated change units compared to those that are lagging, a greater abundance and diversity of networks, strong and weak, internal and external, and across system levels were found. These network connections facilitate change implementation not only by sharing information but also by providing the capabilities to exchange and combine knowledge and by enabling local self-design.

This study of 40 units in a large multinational corporation considers the influence of the density of networks of strong ties on the implementation of planned organizational change between organizational units and unit leaders in both a change implementation and a change recipient network. Also examined are the effects of the density of networks of strong ties within the change recipient network of units and unit leaders on the use of change. The results suggest the need for implementers of change to create strong ties with the change recipient units for successful change implementation. Both unit level and unit leader density of strong ties within the change recipient unit network were significant predictors of change use, indicating that both unit members and unit leaders may play central but independent roles in influencing the change use process. Implications for using social network analysis in planned organizational change are discussed.

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