On Studying Organizational Knowledge

There is a sense of incompleteness pervading today’s conceptualizations of knowledge in organizations. While the theorizing on knowledge from different disciplinary perspectives and intellectual foci has produced a vast and diversified body of literature on the subject, the proliferation of organizational knowledge theories has not been accompanied by a parallel development of methodologies for studying knowledge empirically. Following the tenets of the phenomenological method this paper develops a framework to conduct description and observation of knowledge-based phenomena in organizational settings. Such framework is based on three methodological lenses: time, breakdowns, and narratives. The three lenses provide operational devices to disentangle organizational knowledge from the tacit background against which it is utilized on a day-to-day basis. 1 The ideas contained in this paper are largely based on a forthcoming book published by the author (see Patriotta 2003)