Knowledge Management from a Social Perspective: The Contribution of Practice-Based Studies

An exploration of knowledge creation processes in Open Innovation

“…Practices are "the coordinated activities of individuals and groups in doing their "real work" as it is informed by a particular organisational or group context" (Cook & Brown, 1999: 387). Whereas the cognitive approach views knowledge as something residing with an individual, from the practice-based view, knowing is a collective activity situated in practices (Gheradi & Miele, 2018). Thus, rather than understanding 'common knowledge' to enable collaboration, from the practice-based view, 'common practices' are important (Brown & Duguid, 1991).…”

“…The practice-based approach focuses on practices and the relationships between them, rather than on agents and their activities (Nicolini, 2012). The cognitive approach views knowledge as something located with individuals, whereas from the practice-based view, knowing is a collective activity situated in practices (Gheradi & Miele, 2018). From the cognitive view, 'common knowledge' is important for collaboration; whereas from the practice-based view, the concept of common practices is important (Brown & Duguid, 1991).…”

“…Taking a practice-based view of knowledge reflects observations that knowledge in OI processes has a strong social component and offers advantages to theorising OI processes. Taking this approach extends the conceptualisation of knowledge in an OI process from tacit (uncodifiable) and explicit (codifiable) knowledge associated with individuals, to the more inclusive notion of knowledge as manifesting in practices and in the objects used in those practices (Gheradi & Miele, 2018) in addition to that knowledge located with individuals. This view of knowledge allows us to include mediation of knowledge by boundary objects as well as boundary-spanners (people) in our consideration of OI.…”

“…Over the course of the study, both OI teams accomplished significant progress, demonstrating that they were able to leverage their differences to create extensive new knowledge of social and economic benefit. This study takes a novel approach to examining OI endeavours by using a practice-based view of knowledge (Gheradi & Miele, 2018;Nicolini, 2011;Feldman & Orlikowski, 2010), from the well-developed Knowing-in-practice literature (Carlile, 2002(Carlile, , 2004Gheradi, 2006;Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2016), as the theoretical lens. As a result, while most studies of OI projects take an organisation level view, this study was able to focus on individual level events as the OI projects unfolded.…”

“…Therefore, taking this view of knowledge implies taking an individual level view of knowledge processes, and thus provides a means of examining OI processes at the micro-level, to supplement the majority of studies in the OI literature at the level of the organisation. Taking a practice-based view of knowledge offers further advantages to theorising OI processes by extending the theorisation of knowledge from codified knowledge and individually held knowledge to take into account the knowledge embedded in materiality as well as in social relations (Gheradi & Miele, 2018). This extension to conceptualising knowledge enables the theorisation of knowledge 'flow' to extend to include the role of objects as well as people.…”