Towards a Post-Human Distributed Cognition Environment

The view of communities of practice as the relevant context for generating and learning knowledge has raised fears that these will fall prey to various organizational, social or political manipulations. The paper wants to question these humanist concerns arguing that knowledge context is increasingly becoming a post-human context that lies beyond the direct control and manipulation by humans. In terms of this posthuman position, the paper outlines this shift, suggesting that emergence replaces human intentionality and the dynamic partnership between humans and non-humans, intelligent machines replaces the liberalist, humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control knowledge. The present view wants to raise/rekindle the debate on the prospects of managing knowledge and learning in organizations. Finally, implications for the community-based learning theory are discussed.