Understanding Boundary-Spanning in Knowledge Work: Implications for IT Use*

interests include understanding collaboration practices on multi-party systems development projects, knowledge management in IT service delivery organizations, IT outsourcing strategy and implementation, and technology design principles in heterogeneous environments. Her research interests concern the construction of intra-organizational boundaries with practices of IS and the transformation of the relationships between CoPs and formal organization with agents' use of ITs. She has presented her work at the Academy of Management Conference and has published ABSTRACT Knowledge work requires the spanning of inter-and intra-organizational boundaries to integrate diverse competencies and foster innovation. Information Technology (IT) is often viewed as a critical tool for boundary-spanning. Yet many experiences with IT implementations for spanning boundaries have been disappointing. We explore this issue by asking: How is IT used to span the boundaries in knowledge work? The organizational literature has distinguished two boundary-spanning devices: boundary spanners and objects. Currently, the main perspective concentrates on boundary spanners' roles and on boundary objects' properties and considers boundaries as fixed. We propose a complementary perspective on boundary-spanning that focuses on boundaries themselves. Bourdieu's practice theory helps us conceptualize the dynamics of boundaries and boundary-spanning practices. Following Bourdieu's principles for conducting empirical work, which emphasize comparative methods, we apply this conceptualization to two in-depth case studies. We find that only boundary spanners-in-practice (as opposed to boundary spanners-in-role) actually span the boundaries in knowledge work. Moreover, only boundary spanners-in-practice create and use boundary objects-in-use. We also note that, in the presence of boundary spanners-in-practice, IT-based artifacts can be used as boundary objects. As IT-based artifacts become boundary objects-in-use, their structural properties change. Furthermore, agents who use IT-based artifacts to span the boundaries in knowledge work become spanners-in-practice, leading to the emergence of a new boundary-between spanners and non-spanners. We draw implications of these results for IS and management research and practice.