Having a realistic attitude towards information, knowledge and change management

Currently, I am struggling my way through Giddens” rewarding, but dense, Magnus Opum The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (1986). And to ensure some ‘’stickiness”, pondering is definitively needed.

Lecturing at the University of Amsterdam, I became enthralled by the stories about his focus on practices, floating between the extremes of structure and agency. This duality of structure is about how practices are formed by structure, and how agents” continuous recurrence of practices lead to embeddedness, fostering fossilization that underpins structure. These regenerated structures in turn influence practices, institutionalizing the perpetuum mobilae. Often his theory is simplified into the simple questions, are our actions exogenously determined by the social structure we live within or are we free agents exerting endogenous powers on our own destiny, thereby forming our structure.

These theories can be applied to help us guide our thinking about various IT-situations, e.g. information management, knowledge management or organization management. These terms do not capture the essence because of their objectivistic connotation, by which they dilute their inherently wicked nature (Buchanon, 1992). A salient feature of wicked problems is that they can not be solved, ”they rather can be designed around” (Paconowsky, 1995).

Information Management
Discourses about Information Management often focus on IT for IT, or what kind of information systems should be made available to support business processes. Often, we have to acknowledge that a one size fits all technology does not hold up to a realistic view of the organization. Different organizational processes, require different treatment. Yet ultimate social stratification leads to personal information management, which requires one size fits one person technology. However exploiting this vision, neglects the (in)formal organizational/social relations and meaning ambiguity that agents have. Thus both options are not feasible, but often exercised in organizations.

Behold, it is improper to conceive of a social system merely as the product of either deliberate human action or of institutional forces (Orlikowsi, 1992). Both the perspective of the structuralist (focus on structure) and of the symbolic interactionist (focus on the agent) do not help us out in this case. It is as Huizing (2007) argues that both extremes will never fit, we need to search for the middle-range theory (Pawson and Tilley, 1997) that explains what works, for whom, in what circumstances.

Giddens (1986) claims that the level of practices is the suitable level of analysis. In the case of Information Management, IT should support not corporate level, not agency level, but the praxis of groups. Then, this means dissociating oneself from ERP based approaches, in a way that structure-systems can not solely exogenously determine behavior and use of the tool. However, the exogenous or structure perspective predominantly prevails (Gartner, 2008) exemplifies this, resulting in macro-approaches towards Information Management. However, at the same time, one needs to disassociate oneself from agency based approach, that claims that users determine the use of and behavior towards any tool. This endogenous perspective leads to micro-approaches towards Information Management. Attempts to rigidly unite this dualism has already proven a fallacious in communistic legacies (individuals reign the country, within the constraints of a Five-Year Plan).

We already claimed that middle-range Information Management could help us in this dilemma. Focus on the practices of groups or – what has been in vogue since the turn of the century – Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998). We see social software navigating towards that middle-range. Professional blogs enable groups within call centers to support their daily activities, we see online knowledge cafes supporting the practices of peers, we see wikis supporting collaborative writing expeditions, whilst all these social tools have one thing in common: They do not have the ambition to support the entirety, just the community.

Yet, besides uncritically singing social software praises, it is may be named paradoxical that the focus of contemporary social software is tilting toward community (see al the networking scions, with their metaphors of ”connecting” and ”collecting”, ”like LinkedIn, Hyves, Facebook, Del.icio.us ), while neglecting – or at least discounting – the rest of the concept, its reason d”être, its practice.

Knowledge Management
The use of Giddens’s theory of structuration, and more specifically the duality between objectivism and subjectivism has already been elaborated, far more eloquently and legitimate than I can do, by Ard Huizing. In his discussion of The value of a rose: Rising above objectivism and subjectivism (2007b) and Objectivist by default: Why Information Management needs a new foundation (2007a). Although object or document oriented knowledge strategies might seem obsolete, claims like the need for ”capturing knowledge” still prevail in Boardrooms. These claims neglect to reflect realism in knowledge practices; no one has ever seen knowledge, let alone having actually catch it in his ”mental fishing net”. And if managers still attribute realism to these customs, than he or she should not be unsympathetic to equate knowledge managers to data entry typists.

Just like I held at the previous section on Information Management, these quests should not blindly follow totalitarian approaches towards knowledge explication (objectivism), or solo approaches that dogmatically revere uniqueness of meaning (subjectivism). Knowledge quests should be embedded in the practices of negotiation, within the constraints of a mutually purposeful enterprise.

Organizational Management
In organizational restructuring practices we often see exploits of structure- or agency-perseverance. In case of fusions or restructurings organizational blue prints are often designed from a structural perspective, in this case the hierarchic structure is leading for the redesign. Popular afterburners like culture programs or social capital programs (Coleman, 1988) again illustrate the structuralist dogmas that are associated with organizational redesign.

The other perspective of organizational restructuring is operated by employee or resume characteristics. Employee lists in this case led to individual placements. Work councils pay close attention to these trajectories. Both are not ideal from a knowledge based perspective, both neglect the practices that underlie human capital (Wenger, 1998).

Again I would like to advocate a practice-based perspective reckoning the daily work processes and procedures.

About practice
Although the importance of practice might be acknowledged, defining and demarcating the concept remains quite slippery. That’’s why definitions vary, but it has to do with stable routine enactments in which human and non-human elements interact (Gherardi, 2006), or ‘’socially recognizable forms of activity, done on the basis of what members learn from others” (Schatzski, Knorr Cetina and Von Savigny, 2001, p.19). And especially the networked character of a practice makes its rather illusive.

Giddens (1986) states that practices are largely embedded in an agent’’s practical consciousness – like inventing a new fabric process – and not necessarily discursive consciousness – like processing a familiar service request . This is exactly the reason why these can not be extracted from resumes or moulded by structure, because both require a high level of expliciation, or discursive consciousness, while lacking the necessary practical consciousness. Thus focusing on the shared forms of activity of members, which might not be immediately expliciated by them and thus are consequently left out of professional resumes or knowledge repositories, should be the focus for information management, knowledge management, as well as organizational redesign – or perhaps more generally stated all social nexuses.

Thus a slightly different approach would perhaps require more effort, and might not present a smooth path to happiness… But it might turn out that this lens is necessary in social contexts to preserve the essence that underpins all organizing; a social practice that has a multilateral reciprocity and requires and practical understanding of members to achieve an intended result, which might bring also unintended consequences, that could not be obtained otherwise.