Towards a discursive approach to organisational knowledge formation

Within the dominant discourse on knowledge management (KM), knowledge has been reduced to an ahistorical, immutable but mobile resource. In this process, it has fallen victim to a number of KM practices, such as documenting, disseminating, measuring, etc. It is assumed that such KM practices merely displace knowledge from one mode of symbolising to another, without intervening in its content, which is assumed to be something other than those practices. This paper, on the contrary, views knowledge as a contingent, open-ended outcome of those very KM practices. Following Foucault's notion of discourse, it is argued that organisational knowledge is formed discursively, whereby KM practices are constitutive of knowledge. To illustrate these ideas, a body of material has been drawn from six firms that have outsourced (parts of) their information technology (henceforth IT) in the hope of focusing their attention on their core business, gaining access to the supplier's fund of expert knowledge, and so on. However, in practising IT outsourcing, a specific way of knowing the different areas of IT developed discursively and contextually, which has both amplifying and reducing effects. Hoping to get rid of the IT 'headache', senior managers found themselves increasingly entangled in the bureaucratic practices of documenting IT matters, ensnared in the daily problems of assessing the worth of every separate IT request and being made responsible for its outcomes. This is because the hustle and bustle of IT activities is now captured in a representational form that can be taken into the office for calculation, tabulation and deliberation. The emerging form of knowledge is geared not only towards solving problems associated with managing IT, but also towards constructing those very problems. Knowledge is always an unfinished project, always catering for its own failure. It is not a terminal point, but is always in a process of becoming.