The Limits of Working Knowledge: Reflections on the Links between Organizational Performance and Recent Globally Calamitous Events

Now that we have the benefit of a few years of hindsight, it is timely to reflect on the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2009 and its continuing effects throughout the Eurozone and elsewhere. It provides a particularly intriguing backdrop for theorising on capitalism and the social relationship from an organizational perspective. It also offers a welcome opportunity to revisit Jean-François Lyotard’s (1984) seminal study The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge, as it is intriguing that so few appeared to know that such a disastrous economic crash was about to hit, astonishing that so few clearly predicted it, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the OECD, the World Bank, the European Central Bank, the US Federal Reserve, and influential credit ratings agencies such as Moody’s, Standard & Poors, and Fitch. The staff of these institutions are paid extraordinarily large sums of money to predict these things: bankers, economists, stockbrokers, insurance brokers, risk managers, investment advisers, fund managers, and so on. The few spreadsheet gurus who did predict the crisis appear to have been powerless to do anything about it.1 And integrity in the financial system was found to be wanting. Why? What does this failure say about contemporary social relationships at work? This chapter examines these questions through Lyotard’s lens by asking how people in commercial enterprises understand and define ‘knowledge’ in organizations, how this knowledge is transferred, and how, in turn, this affects organizational performance and working relationships.