Expert Humans or Expert Organizations?

Organization Studies, Spring, 1999 by Frank Mueller, Romano Dyerson

Tapping external knowledge, however, poses the challenge of integrating the new into the existing knowledge base to combine the newly learnt with the already known (Thomas 1992: 289; Kanter 1985: 278). Clark and Staunton (1989: 12) suggest a new term, 'exnovation', to refer to the problems associated with the removal and replacement of existing practices by new ones. Integrating new knowledge into existing organizational routines does not take place without difficulty. Expensive consultants, for example, may be hired, only to have their recommendations disregarded and shelved away. In one of our cases, the Halifax Building Society, a newly established marketing department found its recommendation for a new cheque account resisted by longer established departments. Although difficult, in an era in which technological and regulatory change predisposes the rapid obsolescence of organizational knowledge, the active tapping and integration of new knowledge into daily routines is an exercise with high potential rewards.

However, the rapid obsolescence of knowledge is a problem not just of scale but also of scope. In practice, no organization could ever hope to tap into and integrate the full spectrum of changes taking place within its environment. Consequently, organizations have to learn to be selective in their pattern of interventions. In the financial services for example, it would clearly be important to be up-to-date with changes in the regulatory framework, but it may not be necessary to be as up-to-date with regard to the latest computer software or hardware. Technology, though, can be problematic for both academics and organizations: capital investments in tangible assets can seldom explain more than half of the resulting performance or productivity gains, the rest being a 'sociological black hole'. The latter might stand for employee commitment that has been energized or it might stand for useful changes in organizational arrangements. In this vein, Appelbaum and Batt (1994) recently observed that an increasing number of service firms recognize 'that office automation alone does not improve productivity and that it will be necessary to restructure and change human resource strategies' (ibid.: 100, emphasis added). With obvious human resource management implications, another prominent writer in the information technology field argued that successful process change requires not just restructuring but also 'greater depth of job knowledge and greater breadth of task expertise' (Davenport 1993: 107). However, if one accepts that 'successful' usage of information technology often results from the patterns of social relations and tacit knowledge that sustain it - Kay (1993), for instance, refers to an established 'context of reiteration and reciprocation' (ibid.: 77) which he calls 'architecture', but which Barney (1986) more conventionally calls 'culture' - then it becomes even more doubtful whether decisions over external aspects - e.g. 'up-to-dateness' - can be seen to be at all separate from internal aspects. More specifically, where an organization does not operate in a competitive product market, such as the Department of Social Security or the Inland Revenue, an architecturally-based sound usage of a - strictly speaking - outdated technology might be difficult to classify as anything else but a 'success story'. Is our introduction of these various types of appropriation problems (APs) an unnecessary and perhaps arbitrary complication, or have these underlying issues actually arisen as 'problems' in the existing literature? The IAP has indeed been analyzed by various disciplines, including HRM, but typically only indirectly or implicitly, and never in explicit conjunction with the EAP.