Knowledge management in the making: using the balanced scorecard and e-mail systems

Purpose – Knowledge management deals with the production, application, and distribution of knowledge within and between organizations. Such intellectual resources do not appear ex nihilo, but are always constituted through practices and undertakings in an everyday work life setting. This paper seeks to examine how two managerial tools, the balanced scorecard and an e-mail system, are used to represent and classify various knowledge-based resources in two organizations. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on Foucault’s perhaps least recognized work, The Birth of the Clinic and shows how what Foucault calls sensible knowledge is useful for understanding BSC and the e-mail system. Sensible knowledge integrates a number of human faculties such as ocular, representational, and communicative skills in many cases taken for granted and poorly considered in organization theory. Two case studies serve as the primary empirical domain. Findings – The paper concludes that knowledge can never be taken for granted, but must always be examined at the level of its constitution and reproduction, i.e. within the regimes of representation and classification in which practitioners operate. Such regimes of representation and classification are immanent in a variety of managerial tools and technological systems and must therefore be examined in greater details. Research limitations/implications – The immediate implications from managerial tools and technological systems need to be studied in their context and understood as principal resources for managing knowledge in practice. Originality/value – The paper bridges theoretical writings on representation classification, sensible knowledge and the more mundane everyday work life practices that constitute organizations.