Twenty-first International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

This paper discusses how digital technology changes how organizational knowledge is developed and used. Digital technology changes knowledge in ways that have unintended consequences for organizations. Based on a literature study this paper develops new interpretations of what organizational knowledge has become. A central claim is made that organizational knowledge require the implicated actors to balancing micro and macro forces as they interact and negotiate order and disorder to support their development. According to Antonacopoulou, et.al. 2005 organizational renewal is an ongoing creative process of structuring and stabilizing reality. Since stability and change co-exist our understanding of practices need to alter, where practices get informed and inform practices at the micro level and at the macro level and vice versa (ibid.). In this way both the artefacts in use and how the humans interact both with the artefacts and with other actors, will influence what knowledge is valid at any one time. This opens up for a waste amount of interpretation of what knowledge is, which knowledge is valid at any time and by whom, and how knowledge is revamped by what artefacts. This paper partly supports Antonacopoulou et.al, 2005 claim, that as learning take place organizing emerges as a pattern, and features relating to organizing shape the learning process dynamics. A stronger claim is made that digital technology not only changes and influence the learning processes leading to knowledge, but determines what knowledge is and what knowledge is the right knowledge.