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Architectures of Knowledge
Firms, Capabilities, and Communities
Ash Amin and Patrick Cohendet
196 pages
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numerous text boxes & figures
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234x156mm
978-0-19-925333-3
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Paperback
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15 January 2004
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- Proposes a new approach combining economic and sociological methods.
- Tackles major questions of policy at both a corporate and national level.
- An accessible synthesis of the main approaches to knowledge.
- Develops the concept of communities of practice.
"This book is, in my opinion, a real tour de force. It convincingly assembles together the most advanced research in different disciplines: economics, science and technology studies, cognitive sciences (including situated and distributed cognition), and management science; and in doing so is one of the first systematic attempts to find a common thread between these disciplines... The book develops a framework that allows each theoretical approach its own niche. Neither syncretism, nor eclecticism, but a real integration."
Professor Michel Callon, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris, author of The Laws of the Markets, (Blackwell
Publishing, 1998)
In Architectures of Knowledge. Ash Amin and Patrick Cohendet argue that the time is right for research to explore the relationship between two other dimensions of knowledge in order to explain the innovative performance of firms: between knowledge that is 'possessed' and knowledge that is 'practised' generally within communities of like-minded employees in a firm. The impetus behind this argument is both conceptual and empirical. Conceptually, there is a need to explore the interaction of knowledge that firms possess in the form of established competences or stored memory, with the knowing that occurs in distributed communities through the conscious and unconscious acts of social interaction. Empirically, the impetus comes from the challenge
faced by firms to the hierarchically defined architecture that bring together specialized units of (possessed) knowledge and the distributed and always unstable architecture of knowledge that draws on the continuously changing capacity of interpretation among actors.
In this book, these questions of the dynamics of innovating/learning through practices of knowing, and the management of the interface between transactional and knowledge imperatives, are approached in a cross-disciplinary and empirically grounded manner. The book is the synthesis of an innovative encounter between a socio-spatial theorist and an economist. The book results from the delicate interplay between two very different epistemologies and consequent positions, but which progressively
converged towards what is hoped to be a novel vision.
The book begins by explaining why knowledge is becoming more of a core element of the value-generating process in the economy, then juxtaposes the economic and cognitive theorisations of knowledge in firms with pragmatic and socially grounded theorisations and a critical exploration of the neglected dimension of the spatiality of knowledge formation in firms. The book concludes by discussing the corporate governance implications of learning based on competences and communities, and a how national science and technology policies might respond to the idea of learning as a distributed, non-cognitive, practice-based phenomenon.
Readership: Post graduate students and researchers in organizations, knowledge management, business economics, science studies, economic sociology, economic geography and innovation studies in general.
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Ash Amin, Professor of Geography, Durham University, and Patrick Cohendet, Professor of Economics, University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg
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"This slim and well-produced book shows we must now move far beyond narrow discussions of managing communities of practice and learning organizations and consider the broader implications for a changing socio-economy increasingly driven by knowledge." - Prometheus, Vol. 23, No. 1, March 2005
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1: Placing Knowledge
2: Economics of Knowledge Reconsidered
3: The Firm as a Locus of Competence Building
4: Practices of Knowing
5: Spaces of Knowing
6: Communities and Governance of Knowledge
7: Public Policy Implications
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