Mechanisms for producing a working knowledge: Enacting, orchestrating and organizing

TL;DR

This paper explores how knowledge work is enacted through mechanisms that transform, preserve, and organize heterogeneous knowledge representations in complex settings like hospitals.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the strategies and mechanisms used to render knowledge credible, preserve it as living knowledge, and organize work in knowledge-intensive environments.

Findings

Knowledge is rendered credible and relevant through specific work strategies.

Sediments of knowledge are enacted via selective repetition and highlighting.

Codified representations organize and coordinate work in hospitals.

Abstract

Given that knowledge (intensive) work takes place immersed in truly heterogenous networks of knowledge representations (codified, narrative, embedded in routines, inscribed in artefacts), our analysis is geared towards how the transformation of these resources are enacted in the practise of everyday, knowledge work. First, we discuss the work, strategies and mechanisms implied in rendering knowledge as credible, trustworthy and relevant. Second, we analyse how sediments of historically superimposed layers of knowledge representations need to be enacted through selective repetitions, omittance and highlighting to preserve it as living knowledge. Third, supplementing the more cognitivelly oriented aspects of knowledge work, we discuss how codified knowledge representations organise, coordinate and delegate work. Empirically, we study clinical work in large hospitals, a type of work, we argue, that unduely has been left out of traditional listings of knowledge work