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There is an increasing interest in employing e‐mail or other Internet‐based messaging systems in communication between patients and healthcare professionals. Many projects are put into practice, and numerous studies shed light on patients’ preferences regarding e‐messaging and their experience and use of e‐messaging. We argue in this paper that the conventional research in the field to some extent lacks a discussion about what kinds of knowledge an e‐messaging system generates among its users when it is put into practice. We suggest that placing the concept of knowledge as a discourse in focus, stressing how patients make judgements and distinctions in their use of e‐messaging, exposes important aspects not only regarding how patients relate to the system but also what e‐messaging in the healthcare sector means. We illustrate such a perspective with empirical material based on two focus groups of users of an e‐messaging system via a Swedish healthcare Web portal. Three kinds of knowledge formations are illuminated in this context: how patients develop knowledge by comparing e‐messaging services with traditional ways to contact healthcare; how the system generates a further demand for control by its users; and how the e‐messaging system helps users develop knowledge of the healthcare system in general.

Identification, generation, transfer, storage and efficient integration of knowledge occupy today’s corporate managers, and there is increasing interest in different strategies for managing knowledge. Many strategies correspond to different kinds of information technology, for example, intranet. An intranet can be regarded both as an information and strategic management tool in the context of knowledge management. A lack of reflexivity in intranet use is based on the assumption that an intranet is a tool in its masters’ hands. Key elements in managing an intranet (such as, activity level and information input) are not just tools to control the transportation of information and knowledge in a convenient and efficient way. Rather, as constituents, these elements create the intranet. Several empirical examples suggest how information presented in an intranet – and knowledge about the information – is co‐created in the process of using an intranet. A Foucauldian vision of knowledge as discursive practices, including representation, extends the overly static realist version of knowledge found in much KM. Furthermore, if highest demand for intranet activity levels were met, professional investment managers would be forced to become generalists

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.

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.

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.

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.

The paper bridges theoretical writings on representation classification, sensible knowledge and the more mundane everyday work life practices that constitute organizations.

The management and the control of knowledge‐intensive organizations have recently been subject to empirical studies. Much of the literature suggests that management control, defined and operationalized in a variety of ways and examined within different traditions, in essence affects co‐workers negatively. On the other hand, proponents of management control practices such as consultants stress the positive and productive aspects of such practices. Contrary to these skeptical and overtly rosy views, this paper seeks to contribute with a different perspective on the uses of total quality management (TQM) in organizations.

This paper presents a study of the Swedish insurance company Agria employing a number of TQM methods and tools to monitor, control and evaluate the performance of the activities from a social embeddedness perspective.

Seeking to encourage accounts within such an affirmative view, the paper calls for more research into the knowledge workers' purposive action embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations. That is, management control mechanisms are neither imposed from above, nor are they procedures that can be individually selected and enacted. Instead, management control practices are embedded in social relations including norms, values, and preexisting standard operating procedures.

By conceiving of management control practices as being socially embedded, the Scylla and Charybdis of under‐ and oversocialized theories of management control can be avoided. That is, TQM practices may be regarded as “technologies of the self” that knowledge workers may use as part of their day‐to‐day work.

The paper presents an affirmative view of TQM and shows how TQM practices are used in a Swedish insurance company.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the implementation of 12 different organisation and management innovations (OMIs) in Swedish healthcare, to discover the generic and specific factors important for successful healthcare improvement change in a public health system.

Longitudinal cross‐case comparison of 12 case studies was employed, where each case study used a common framework for collecting data about the process of change, the content of the change, the context, and the intermediate and final outcomes.

Clinical leaders played a more important part in the development of these successful service innovations than managers. Strategies for and patterns of change implementation were found to differ according to the type of innovation. Internal organisational context factors played a significant role in the development of nearly all, but external factors did not. “Developmental evolution” better described the change process than “implementation”.

The 12 cases were all of relatively successful change processes: some unsuccessful examples would have provided additional testing of the hypotheses about what would predict successful innovation which were used in the case comparison. The cross‐case comparative hypothesis testing method allows systematic comparison if the case data are collected using similar frameworks, but this approach to management research requires considerable resources and coordination.

Management innovations that improve patient care can be carried out successfully by senior clinicians, under certain circumstances. A systematic approach is important both for developing and adapting an innovation to a changing situation. A significant amount of time was required for all involved, which could be reduced by “fast‐tracking” approval for some types of change.

This is the first empirical report comparing longitudinal and contextualised findings from a number of case studies of different organisational and management healthcare innovations. The findings made possible explanations for success factors and useful practical recommendations for conditions needed to nurture such innovation in public healthcare.