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This study aims to test the validity of a knowledge work typology proposed by Davenport. Although this typology has been referenced extensively in the literature, it does not appear to have been empirically validated.

The typology was tested through a questionnaire survey among knowledge workers (n=459) in a multinational company. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied to determine the knowledge work groupings arising from the survey.

The vast majority of the respondents could not be grouped into any one of Davenport's four knowledge work types. Furthermore, PCA revealed four groupings: low‐agency collaboration; low‐ agency routine work; rule‐based work; and high‐agency expert work. The results confirm only one of Davenport's typology models, the Expert model. Davenport's Collaboration model was found to have elements of the Transaction model. The Transaction and the Integration typology models were not confirmed. Instead, two further models incorporating elements of both Transaction and Integration models emerged. Finally, in contrast to Davenport's typology, the clusters that emerged from this study do not fit a matrix structure.

A follow‐up qualitative study would be required to better understand the four models that emerged from the data and to elucidate organisational factors that underpin the models.

This is the first empirical study testing the validity of Davenport's typology.

In the UK, management consultancy is a £2 billion per annum business sector. Major consultancy firms are global or European enterprises which match and perhaps lead the emerging global or regional nature of markets. Yet little is known about these agencies of change, these intelligence networks which have come to play such a significant, perhaps pivotal role in organizational and management development. Part I of this two‐part article presents the role of management consultancy in the context of a knowledge typology – and reports on some of the findings of a preliminary research project.

Organizational silos that build on the existing organizational structures are often considered to have negative effects in the form of focus on private narrow objectives and organizational fragmentation. To avoid such harmful outcomes, competence management is called for, and in this, the human resources (HR) function takes a key role. Among other things, it can provide basis for emergence and utilization of communities of practice (CoPs) that build on common interests and effectively cross organizational boundaries. These features of CoPs allow them to carry competences and ease knowledge transfer and to break down the harmful isolation. Quite paradoxically, the challenge is that CoPs can also form within silos, thereby strengthening isolation, and HR as a utility department can itself be particularly prone to the silo effects. Examination of boundaries and silos through an original study conducted in a Finnish energy sector company suggests that HR managers need competences outside their own expertise area and courage to augment their CoPs across the functional boundaries to break out of the HR silo and to assist other functions to do the same.

The study is based on qualitative research data gathered in four focus group interviews with HR personnel from an energy sector company in November 2012. Totally, 19 professionals were interviewed (five HR partners, five talent development and performance managers, five vice presidents of HR and four HR managers) in the four focus groups. The company’s HR personnel represented units from Finland, Sweden, Poland and Estonia.

Examination of boundaries and silos in the Finnish energy sector suggests that HR managers need competences outside their own field (e.g. knowledge of the business and offerings of the firm) and courage to augment their CoPs across the functional boundaries to break out of the HR silo and to assist other functions to do the same.

Research provided that CoPs can have different effects on silos. As they are capable of crossing organizational and functional boundaries, they may effectively mitigate adverse silo effects; however, if CoPs are formed within silos, they may strengthen isolation and fragmentation. In addition, utility departments and supporting functions are particularly prone to the risk of CoPs forming within silos. The HR function is one manifestation of this. Paradoxically, it also has the potential to enhance the other type of effects that CoPs can exert, as competence management can be used to foster intentional and self-organizing CoPs that counter silo effects.

This paper aims to study knowledge integration mechanisms in an interdisciplinary research project. It develops the theoretical literature on the concept of knowledge integration, particularly the adoption of different organizational mechanisms. The research helps to explain how to adopt different integration mechanisms in the various steps of a typical university industry research project.

This research relies on a case study. The authors used three data collection techniques: internal document analysis, observation/site visits and semi-structured interviews. Documentary analysis was used to understand the organizational structure and to identify knowledge integration issues. Observation and site visits at university research laboratories were used to increase understanding on particular issues. Staff interviewed included managers and academic researchers.

Findings are primarily related to a better understanding of choices of knowledge integration mechanisms in a university industry research project. A crucial aspect was the level of mutual understanding of specialist knowledge. When project members were derived from different sides of the university-industry border, there was a major need for recurring to more structured knowledge integration mechanisms, even if the scientific background of participants was homogeneous.

Previous studies on the relationships between university and industry deals with the issue of governing the knowledge exchange on the border at a macro level; conversely, an interesting research gap is represented by knowledge integration mechanisms to be deployed on the university-industry border, especially at micro level. In this paper, the authors do not cope explicitly with university-industry coordination mechanisms but use the University-Industry border to study knowledge integration in interdisciplinary setting. The study is exploratory, which may be useful in generating future research hypotheses, connecting the features of research projects with the need to achieve knowledge integration.

With increasingly precarious work contracts, more remote work, and additional flexibility in the timing of the workday, the new world of work is creating both relational opportunities and relational challenges for modern workers. In this chapter, we pair recent research on human thriving with trends we observe in organizations' efforts to create and maintain a sense of community. Key in these efforts is a new kind of built environment – the coworking space – which brings together remote and independent workers and, increasingly, traditional employees as well. We show that in curating community, or perhaps even the possibility of community, coworking spaces may support the interpersonal learning and vitality that help workers to thrive.

Knowledge is recognised as a valuable resource for organizational growth and sustained competitive advantage, especially for organizations operating in uncertain and challenging environments such as construction. Within the construction industry, communities of practice (CoP) have not been effectively embraced as a strategic tool for knowledge creation and sharing within and between organizations. Accordingly, this paper aims to review CoP and present a pragmatic approach for their utilisation.

A review of the literature on CoPs is provided and examples from the authors' experience are provided to demonstrate their usefulness in addressing problems that are being confronted within the construction industry.

The construction industry is sceptical about adopting “management fads” and gimmick technologies that provide no strategic competitive advantage. Evidence of this can be seen with the industry's reluctance, particularly in Australia, to embrace re‐engineering and concepts associated with lean construction. The industry has been informally using CoP, or aspects thereof, for many years but it has not been formally recognised as a performance improvement tool. Organizations may find it difficult to build, sustain and integrate CoP within their organization, especially when staff are geographically spread over numerous remote locations. It is suggested that the underlying concept of CoP can create and sustain learning and knowing in projects.

The challenge for construction organizations is not necessarily to use intra‐organizational forms of CoP, but to learn how they can use them within the project environment within which they operate. A proposal for using communities of practice, namely “champions of practice” (CoPE), at an inter‐organizational level is proposed in this paper. This hybrid form of CoP is dependent on the sharing of knowledge within and across organizational boundaries. For this to happen effectively within a project environment, the right set of communication tools, incentives, motivation, organizational and managerial mechanisms need to be in place for “best practice” to be formalised and shared in a meaningful and reflective way.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the phenomenon of knowledge transfer within multinational corporations (MNCs), and how the imperatives of thought and action that constitute new knowledge are received in the terrain that constitutes the MNC subsidiary.

This study employs an ethnographic approach, and juxtaposes primary data collection with a variety of secondary data sources.

The data are analyzed in light of the theoretical construct of hegemony, and three themes theorized that underlie the process of knowledge transfer. These include knowledge loss at the local level, the coercive practices that ensure knowledge transfer, and the invocation of imperial subjectivities by the headquarters of the MNC when dealing with subsidiaries from poorer nations.

This paper goes beyond the mainstream approaches into organizational knowledge transfer, by analyzing these issues in light of political economy, and the changing landscape of industrial accumulation. It offers in some measure, the building blocks of a different organizational theory, one that is sensitive to those subjects who are consigned to the periphery of mainstream organizing.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate boundary spanning tactics in a cross-organizational virtual alliance and discuss the analytical value of “digging” into technology for excavating boundaries and understanding their dynamic and emergent features.

Although boundaries, their role and implications have been extensively investigated across a variety of online settings, the results are inconclusive as to the features of technology that create, dissolve or re-locate boundaries. This is attributed to the fact that in most cases technology is addressed as a black box – a discrete artefact of practice – without seeking justification for the inscribed functions that enable or constrain use. The paper overcomes these shortcomings by analysing digital trace data compiled through a virtual ethnographic assessment of a cross-organizational tourism alliance. Data comprise electronic traces of online collaboration whose interpretive capacity is augmented using knowledge visualization techniques capable of revealing dynamic and emergent features of boundary spanning.

Boundary spanning in virtual settings entails micro-negotiations around several types of boundaries. Some of them are either enforced by or inscribed into technology, while others are enacted in practice. Knowledge visualization of digital trace data allows “excavation” of these boundaries, assessment of their implications on distributed organizing of online ensembles and discovery of “hidden” knowledge that drives boundary spanning tactics of collaborators.

In cross-organizational collaborative settings, boundary spanning represents an enacted capability stemming from the intertwining between material and social/collective agencies. Consequently, boundaries surface as first class design constructs, directing design attention not only to features inscribed in technology (i.e. user profiles, registration mechanisms, moderation policies) but also the way such features are appropriated to re-shape, re-locate or dissolve boundaries.

An empirical data pool compiled through virtual ethnographic assessment of online collaboration is revisited and augmented with knowledge visualization techniques that enhance the interpretive capacity of the data and reveal “hidden” aspects of the collaborators’ boundary spanning behaviour and tactics.

Social work space is emerging as a major avenue for sharing knowledge and the creation of social capital. Social space and physical space needs to be in balance. Virtual space must also be included in this mix. The physical work environment can support the new sense of place and space in the knowledge work. This paper discusses how to use tangible assets to make intangible social space perform better. In this paper the problem is approached by analysing the balance between physical, social and virtual space. The method used is based on “type” analysis, which uses the structure of a four‐quadrant model based on twin axis for the knowledge production circle. The focus is on the space needed in different phases of creating knowledge. The results of the pilot test show that work environments tend to support explicit knowledge sharing but fail to support tacit knowledge exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent and under which conditions R&D projects benefit from team members’ participation in spontaneous and work-related communities of practice (CoPs).

This is a quantitative empirical study. R&D projects are the unit of analysis. Data are collected through interviews to 121 informants who are members of 60 R&D projects and participants in 195 CoPs.

The participation of project team members in work-related CoPs positively affects the R&D project performance. This positive effect applies also to radically innovative projects. The diversity in the institutional affiliation of CoPs members is also highly significant and positively correlated with the project performance.

The paper considers only work-related CoPs, thus neglecting the knowledge transacted through other types of CoPs.

Practitioners should support the autonomous participation of project team members to spontaneous and work-related CoPs that cut across the organizational boundaries. Team leaders may enhance team innovative capabilities and performance by ensuring diversity of knowledge and skills from CoPs whose members work for institutions that differ from each other.

First, this study provides quantitative evidence of the CoPs ability to support innovation. Second, this research is focused on spontaneous and work-related CoPs within business environments. Third, this study does not analyze CoPs performance, but it postulates a connection between innovative organizational units (i.e. R&D projects) and spontaneous CoPs that cut across the firms’ boundaries.