Content area
Full text
Introduction
The last two decades of information science, information and knowledge management and organisational learning research have put increasing emphasis on the social and emergent nature of knowledge. The notions such as communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), dialogue (Isaacs, 1993), information cultures (Choo et al., 2008; Widén and Holmberg, 2012) and social capital (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Widén-Wulff et al., 2008) have had a major impact on research and practice in these fields. In contrast to the earlier tendencies of perceiving information, and to a certain extent even knowledge, as an object-like resource, the broad paradigmatic view of knowledge work shared by the contemporary mainstream approaches focuses on the management of the premises of knowledge work, knowing and organisational learning rather than on the management of knowledge-objects (Newell et al., 2009). The tenet of the latter, non-object-focused, line of research (e.g. Brown and Duguid, 2000; Wenger et al., 2002; Jonsson, 2007) is that because of the situationality and contextuality of knowledge and knowing, knowledge creation and discoveries can be planned and supported, but not directly made to happen. However, in contrast to the interest of describing and managing the social processes of knowing, information and knowledge management and information science research have put less emphasis on discussing the mechanisms of how knowledge happens, how particular information becomes exploitable, usable and useful, and how it is used in different contexts and situations (e.g. Savolainen, 2009a; Rowley, 2000).
The process as a whole and the parts of it have been conceptualised in the literature from a variety of perspectives using partly complementary, overlapping and synonymous notions including sense-making (Dervin, 2003), information utilisation (Todd, 1999), learning (e.g. Choo, 1996; Sinkula, 1994) or knowledge use (e.g. Valentine et al., 2012). Savolainen (2009a) notes that much of the recent discussion on these topics in information disciplines is characterised by a certain propensity for constructivism in a broad sense of the term.
The specific moment when something happens has been discussed in more specific terms as bricolage (e.g. Baker and Nelson, 2005; Garud and Karnøe, 2003), i.e. “resourcefulness and improvisation on the part of involved actors” (Garud and Karnøe, 2003), creativity (e.g. Smith and Paquette, 2010; Saulais and Ermine, 2012; Kuhlthau, 2008; George, 2007, “related to...