Toward a Sociomaterial Approach to Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge sharing is one of the most important preoccupations of organizational literature. Until recently, knowledge literature has largely assumed an idealist conception of knowledge that posits the production of knowledge as disinterested and individual endeavor. However, these insights are limited in large part because they overlooked the way in which organizing is bound up with materiality. Based on a sociomaterial conception of knowledge, we claim that our ways of dealing with materiality in organization research, and especially in knowledge literature, are conceptually problematic. We argue for an alternative approach, one that posits the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday life. We draw on one case study to illustrate this approach in practice and conclude that a reconfiguration of our conception of knowledge will be useful to understand the complexity of sociomaterial assemblages entailed in contemporary organizations.