Learning/Knowledge Flashcards
Carlile (2002)
Summary: Focus of the paper is on creating knowledge across boundaries. This paper specifically speaks about coordination and knowledge creation across different organizational departments (Sales, Marketing, R&D, etc.). The theme can be extended to differences in things such as identity, ideology, perspective.
Major Contribution 1: Defines knowledge as “localized, embedded, and invested in practice” and defines boundary objects as a way to span different knowledge types and content.
Major Contribution 2: Instead of “translating” knowledge at the margins into systems that are commonly understood (semantic approach), the pragmatic approach proposes a “transformation” of knowledge that combines localized/specialized knowledge from particular domains into shared organizational knowledge.
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological) - qualitative ethnography that details the process of generating new knowledge rather than just translating it from party to party.
Carlile (2004)
Summary: Similar to previous Carlile paper, this article makes the case that innovation occurs at the boundaries between specialized domains. Defines three specific types of boundaries through which knowledge can flow and transfer.
Major Contribution 1: Pragmatic Boundary - knowledge shared through development of common interests and transformation of knowledge.
Major Contribution 2: Semantic Boundary - Common means are developed to generate a common understanding/way to share knowledge at a boundary.
Major Contribution 3: Syntactic - Common lexicon developed that can sufficiently share and assess knowledge at a boundary.
Bechky (2003)
Summary: Parallels Carlile’s framing of knowledge sharing. Paper explores misunderstandings between engineers, techs, assemblers on a production floor. Solved issues by creating common ground that transforms their collective understanding of the product and production process.
Major Contribution 1: Difficulties are rooted in differences in language, the locus of practice, and conceptualization of the product.
Major Contribution 2: Solutions invoked and named the differences in work contexts and created common ground around the product and the problems they face in the production process.
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological) another ethnography in the space of knowledge sharing and uncovering the nuances of the difficulties of knowledge sharing and translation.
Langley et al. (2019)
Summary: Reviews the literature on boundary work, provides three distinct forms of boundary work emerging from literature – competitive, collaborative, configurational.
Sections on framing and local boundary work’s relationship with wider social trends.
Major Contribution 1: Competitive boundary work = establishing an advantage; collaborative = aligning boundaries to enable collaboration; configurational = manipulating patterns of differentiation and integration to ensure certain activities are brought together while others are kept apart.
Major Contribution 2: Boundaries can be viewed as barriers, but they can also be seen as junctures that allow the potential for collaboration.
Major Contribution 3: Frames the process of organizational design as “open-ended and continually becoming.” – a way to integrate power dynamics and temporality into the study of the organizing process.
Rycroft-Smith (2022)
Summary: Explores knowledge brokering from policy to practice in the education field.
Major Contribution 1: Studying knowledge brokering requires more than studying knowledge brokers – the process includes a set of actors, activities, and motivations within which research is engaged, transformed, and communicated.
Major Contribution 2: Various types of knowledge brokering – including facilitating relationships, crossing boundaries, spanning communities, removing barriers, building connections, interpreting for others, and matchmaking.
Major Contribution 3: Provides a set of accessibility aspects for knowledge brokers to attend to: language, location, structure, scale, threshold, norms
Orlikowski (2002)
Summary: “Knowing in practice” which refers to human action as an essential part of knowing how to get things done in complex work.
Major Contribution 1: Knowing is an ongoing social practice, that is created and recreated as people participate actively in the world. This happens through sharing identity, interacting face to face, aligning effort, learning by doing, and supporting participation.
Major Contribution 2: Defines “sharing identity” as engaging in common training and socialization in order to identify with the organization. My question = what are implications of different identities?
Major Contribution 3: Competency is not a static or stored trait, it is produced and refined through “skillful performance.” Org imperative is creating the conditions under which skillful practice is likely to be enacted.
Shamsie & Mannor (2013)
Summary: Centered around the importance of tacit knowledge in team/organizational performance
Both individual (discrete) and integrated (linked) tacit knowledge are analyzed
Major Contribution 1: Tacit knowledge framed as critical resource for organizations – can be discrete (individual) or linked (synced between individuals). Practical knowledge gained and deeply understood through experiences.
Major Contribution 2: Another dimension of tacit knowledge is productive (measured by games played in MLB sample) v. administrative (measured by games coached/managed in MLB sample).
Major Contribution 3: Hypotheses supported that large amounts of tacit knowledge are predictive of organizational success (winning % in MLB context).
Tortoriello et al. (2015)
Summary: Social networks study to explore the social structural conditions conducive to individuals supporting, facilitating, and promoting the innovativeness of their colleagues (role = catalysts of innovation).
Major Contribution 1: Main argument = having access to diverse knowledge through a closed network enables individuals to act as information catalysts.
Major Contribution 2: Differentiates catalysts of innovation from knowledge brokers, whose goal is to facilitate innovation. Catalysts of innovation are willing to provide knowledge inputs to help their colleagues be more innovative.
Major Contribution 3: Catalysts of innovation may play a large role in operationalizing structures and climates that are conducive to innovation, by providing the individual input to the innovative process.
Nicolini et al. (2022)
Summary: Paper is a conceptual review on communities of practice, defined broadly as people bound together by a common activity, shared expertise, a passion for a joint expertise, and a desire to learn or improve their practice.
Major Contribution 1: Three major purposes of CoPs: fostering learning and knowledge sharing, sources of innovation, and mechanisms to defend interests and perpetuate control over domains.
Major Contribution 2: Communities of practice involve shared words, tools, stories, symbols that all combine to create an experience of shared identity and mutual engagement.
Major Contribution 3: Studies of CoPs are largely unrelated from studies of identity and identity work in organizations. Studies do not look at how work identities and organizational identities interrupt, complement, or complicated associations with CoPs.
Bourdieu (1986)
Summary: Defines the three types of capital, which is broadly defined as “accumulated labor…which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive basis…enables [one] to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor”
Major Contribution 1: Cultural capital = “rules of the game”. It can be embodied, objectified, or institutionalized.
Major Contribution 2: Social capital = derived from relationships. Individuals can rely on common group members for various types of support, and relationships can be treated [consciously or unconsciously] as investments, whereby investing more in relationships and networks will yield benefits (such as job references, entry into elite institutions, etc.) at a later date.
Major Contribution 3: Economic capital = immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights. Can be inferred by one’s cultural and social capital (though it’s not always the case), but this is the most self-evident form of capital in PB’s work.
Beyer & Hannah (2002)
Summary: Qualitative, longitudinal study of two groups who were beginning work in a new research organization. Shows how backgrounds and previous experiences shape the assimilation process into their new organizations.
Major Contribution 1: Past experienced affected assimilation in three primary ways: personal identities they carried, know-how from previous jobs, previously-used tactics for managing change. Personal identities can be linked to demographics and social roles.
Major Contribution 2: Newcomers with diverse experience had an easier time assimilating into the new org than those with only narrow experiences.
Major Contribution 3: Study was one of the first to analyze veteran/experienced workers in new situations, rather than workers who were newly-entering the workforce.
Rindova et al. (2011)
Summary: Historical case study of how organizations draw on cultural resources to generate and change organizational strategy.
Major Contribution 1: Changes level of analysis of view of culture as a toolkit whereby individuals draw on resources and knowledge. Orgs can also have this same relationship with culture as a toolkit.
Major Contribution 2: Mechanisms through which orgs draw on culture as part of their strategy formation and alteration = culture repertoire enrichment and organizational identity redefinition.
Major Contribution 3: Model = incorporation of facets from different registers -> repertoire enrichment (process of integrating and aligning) -> unconventional strategies and strategic versatility
Huang (2019)
Summary: Work explaining and applying Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.
Major Contribution 1: Habitus = an understanding and perception of the social world that is shaped by the dominant language, symbols, and power relations of their specific cultural context. This understanding of the world influences the expectations and meanings of events that occur in social life, and is produced by the reservoir of knowledge gained by one’s life experiences
Major Contribution 2: Habitus can be related to occupational/professional milieu, or rooted in life experiences in particular social identities such as class/race/gender/etc.
Major Contribution 3: Habitus can help explain that even two people who attain the same educational achievement, occupational status, etc. can have differing experiences and feel varying levels of fit, deservingness, etc.
Binning et al. (2020)
Summary: Intervention study that aimed to create social norms that erased the relevance of stereotypes in the classroom (STEM college classes).
Major Contribution 1: Belonging intervention students had higher attendance, grades, and college persistence. Improved course grades for minorities and women.
Major Contribution 2: Notes/testimonials from previous students, writing exercises, semistructured were the sources of intervention. This intervention was administered with the goal of increasing belonging and subsequently improving student performance.
Major Contribution 3: Study was an “ecological” belonging intervention, meaning that the intervention interacted with actual elements in student learning environments.
Chen et al. (2021)
Summary: First gen and minority students may harbor doubts about belonging in science. Science identity predicted stronger grades, particularly for minority students.
Major Contribution 1: Identifying as a “science person” predicts success, but this study showed it’s not as much about a “science person” particularly as it is about belonging.
Major Contribution 2: A belonging manipulation eliminated the relationship between science identity and performance among minority students.
Major Contribution 3: Intersectionality not addressed in this study, but principles would hold: “These findings suggest that institutional actions that consider students’ psychological experiences can lead to meaningful improvements, and further
reinforce the notion that institutions should shoulder the effort
to create equitable academic environments.”
Kilduff et al. (2016)
Summary: Two studies of interacting groups, found that disagreements in which two group members viewed themselves as higher in status than the other were uniquely harmful.
Major Contribution 1: Individuals do not participate in disruptive behavior in upward status agreement, but actually disengage from the group.
Major Contribution 2: The findings in this study can be applied to status that is wrongfully or artificially withheld from individual actors from marginalized IDs.
Major Contribution 3: Paper challenges the assumption that status hierarchies in groups are usually agreed on/supported by all.
Liu (2021)
Summary: Framed as a puzzling situation that orgs do not engage diversity – as this creates labor market inefficiencies and untapped opportunities.
Major Contribution 1: Four limits – cognizing, searching, reconfiguring, and legitimizing that deter firms from sensing, seizing, integrating, and justifying valuable diversity.
Major Contribution 2: Reconfiguring limit: the systematic failure to integrate valuable resources because of a resistant to change or failure to reorganize routines. 1202 points out that sometimes, without proper org practices, building a diverse team can generate hostility and negative effects.
Major Contribution 3: Primary argument is that these limits “preserve behavioral failures and labor-market inefficiencies, such that undervalued players remain untapped opportunities. Teams that are able to supersede these limits more effectively than their rivals can monopolize the opportunity and earn contrarian proift.”
Cha and Roberts (2019)
Summary: In-depth interviews with racial minority journalists about identity mobilization tactics.
Major Contribution 1: Mobilization = producing quality work, building relationships, constructing a positive image.
Identity Tension = concern about perpetuating stereotypes, being seen as activists, being pigeon-holed into identity-based stories, and being perceived as non-objective
Major Contribution 2: Strategies used to navigate identity mobilization and tension = crafting, challenging, confirming, and bridging.
Major Contribution 3: In the task of performing objective job requirements, identities are activated and made salient by the actions of others and the content of tasks. These identities can help individuals do their jobs well and contribute in unique ways, but they can also activate tensions and challenges that strain interpersonal relationships, cause harm, and subject people to stereotypes and prejudice associated with their identities.
Bresman and Zellmer-Bruhn (2013)
Summary: Studied self-managed pharma R&D teams. Examined relationship between structure and (internal and external) learning. Found that team and org structure had differential impacts on learning.
Major Contribution 1: Team structure promotes team learning (promotes psych safety), whereas organizational structure impedes team learning (restricts task autonomy).
Major Contribution 2: Differentiation between internal (relating to the work and procedures of the team) and external (scanning environment/competing teams for new ideas) learning.
Major Contribution 3: Used mixed level modeling to assess outcomes given nested nature of data (teams -> units -> orgs).
Fuchs et al. (2019)
Summary: Looks at the “ideator’s bias,” a systematic form of error in which ideas from employees at a higher org level, and from employees generating ideas in groups, are more prone to be viewed in overconfident ways.
Major Contribution 1: Nod to Cable et al. in arguing that self-efficacy beliefs are malleable and dependent on organizational position, task design, socialization, etc.
Major Contribution 2: Ideator’s bias is numerically measured as the distance between an ideator’s estimated value of an idea and the actual value of that idea (measured by accounting’s actual projected economic value of an idea.
Major Contribution 3: Orgs would do well to separate ideas from the idea generation process. Current practice results in the overadoption of ineffective ideas from powerful organizational actors.
Lee Cunningham et al. (2021)
Summary: Centered around the failure of teams to reach full potential due to contributions being withheld as a result of feeling unaccepted or undervalued on a team.
Major Contribution 1: Social worth intervention – by trusted people OUTSIDE of the team – improves performance and knowledge sharing WITHIN the team.
Major Contribution 2: “…teams with social worth affirmation were more likely not only to share unique information..but also to directly ask for information…which suggests that they were less inhibited in seeking out information from others.” (connection to pysch safety)
Major Contribution 3: Did not test conditions of differing information about social worth from teams v. social networks. Nor did it study social worth affirmation within teams. Areas for future research.
Cirella (2021)
Summary: Explores the role of organizational variables in managing and supporting collective creativity.
Major Contribution 1: Found five variables that supports teams and groups developing their collective creativity: a structured process, workrelated team diversity, boundary openness, adequate resources, and support of relevant technology
Major Contribution 2: Team diversity = qualitative support of the finding that: “Diversity of backgrounds and roles seemed to create a climate open to different points of view, supporting collective creativity”
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological): comparative case study between two organizations.
