Expert Humans or Expert Organizations?

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

The discussion so far has highlighted the constraints faced by organizations in their ability to appropriate the added value arising from their stock of human resources. The IAP can also take the form of the organization being less than the sum of its parts, for example, due to the failure of employee involvement. After surveying much of the literature, Dodgson (1993) described individuals as the primary learning entity in a firm. Similarly, Kanter argued that organizations 'know how to learn because their people know how to learn' (1990: 320). However, organizations can also be seen as knowing less than their members because of problems in communication - such as filtering and distortion problems or insufficient 'channel capacity' - or because rapid environmental changes may overload communication networks (Argyris and Schon 1978; Senge 1990).

There is a further dimension to the IAP: because of the difficulty of establishing full control, organizations undergoing technological change may find that their knowledge base has become politicized (Scarbrough and Lannon 1988). Lyles and Schwenk (1992) distinguished between a core knowledge framework that is widely agreed upon within the organization, and supporting knowledge elements which are linked to the core set. Different groups within the organization hold alternative, often politically competing agendas, and may try to enhance their position, for example, by means of task forces or special reports. Similarly, Knights and Murray (1992) see organizational groups as continually re-constructing technology and the market in a way that allows them to secure advantage. For example, marketing could try to influence the IT-system design in order to better satisfy the final consumer. Webb and Dawson (1991), in their research, found that there is a socio-political as well as a purely technical dimension to the problem of managing expertise. There was no 'simple progression from one strategic recipe to another, but instead a continuing tension between manifest and latent formulae, lasting more than a decade' (ibid.: 203). Expertise should be seen in connection with the external infrastructure of occupational and technological forces, making senior management control problematic. In our context, the main political bargaining goes on between top management and groups which derive power from expert knowledge. One such group is that of the information system employees, who exert power due to their position within an organization and their professional allegiance (Scarbrough 1993):

'...a distinctive feature of expert groups is the extent to which their control of certain tasks derives from access to a specialist knowledge base.' (ibid.: 941)

Whilst management typically has to 'pay' in order to access external knowledge, experts can normally do so as part of an established ongoing nonfinancial exchange relationship with outside experts. Information ghettos might thus become jealously guarded by human resources, marked by their knowledgeable expertise. Persuading such expert staff to remain in these ghettos whilst at the same time orienting their actions towards organizational goals, may then become a matter of carefully crafting career and promotion paths. This reflects that the IAP has both a collective and an individual dimension that has to be addressed by management.