Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of Understanding on a Production Floor

This paper suggests that knowledge is shared in organizations through the transformation of occupational communities’ situated understandings of their work. In this paper, I link the misunderstandings between engineers, technicians, and assemblers on a production floor to their work contexts, and demonstrate how members of these communities overcome such problems by cocreating common ground that transforms their understanding of the product and the production process. In particular, I find that the communities’ knowledge-sharing difficulties are rooted in differences in their language, the locus of their practice, and their conceptualization of the product. When communication problems arise, if members of these communities provide solutions which invoke the differences in the work contexts and create common ground between the communities, they can transform the understandings of others and generate a richer understanding of the product and the problems they face. (Knowledge Sharing; Problem Solving; Occupational Communities) There is increasing practical and theoretical interest in how organizations can manage, organize, and integrate knowledge. Because the number of knowledge workers is rising (Blackler et al. 1993) and knowledge has always been important to the functioning of organizations, the successful pursuit of these activities may create competitive advantage. In particular, in analyzing product development and manufacturing firms, industry watchers suggest that managing knowledge through the use of concurrent engineering and cross-functional teams will improve time to market, technology transfer, and innovation (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi 1995, Leonard and Sensiper 1998). While research on product development has stressed the importance of cross-functional integration (Adler 1995, Wheelwright and Clark 1992, Clark and Fujimoto 1991), scholars and practitioners also recognize that integrating such communities can be difficult. Wheelwright and Clark (1992) suggest that all the different functional groups should be actively involved in the phases of development, and point out that a firm’s choice of timing, frequency, direction, and medium of communication can affect the success of this integration. However, even in instances where communication is successful, creating shared understandings may still be problematic (Fiol 1994). Occupational communities, because of the specialization inherent in performing their own tasks successfully, have different perspectives on the work and the organization (Dougherty 1992, Boland and Tenkasi 1995, Carlile 1997). They also develop local understandings as a consequence of differences in expertise and experience (Jelinek and Schoonhoven 1990). The differences in perspectives across these communities can result in trouble sharing knowledge in a way that leads to greater understanding. Managers who want to capitalize on the coordination of diverse functions face the challenge of integrating the understandings of the different groups across the organization. Much of the research that conceptualizes these challenges has emphasized general processes that organizations use to codify and transfer knowledge across boundaries. This work suggests that organizations use structures and processes such as routines and standard operating procedures to codify and transfer knowledge from localized contexts (March and Simon 1958, Levitt and March 1988, Huber 1991, Cohen and Bacdayan 1994). Other scholars have observed that successful knowledge transfer is not so simple, and emphasize that the tacitness of much knowledge often makes codification, transfer, and subsequent replication of routines and standard operating procedures difficult (Nonaka 1991, 1994; Nelson and Winter 1982; Kogut and Zander 1992). This latter perspective suggests the inherent “stickiness” of certain knowledge within localized contexts due to social and cognitive constraints (von Hippel 1994, Nelson and Winter 1982). For example, individuals may Organization Science © 2003 INFORMS Vol. 14, No. 3, May–June 2003, pp. 312–33