Knowledge and work in context: A case of troubleshooting a complex system across ship and shore.

摘要

The implications of knowledge management present two key challenges to human performance technology. In short, the issues are these: (1) how to conceptualize knowledge and work distributed across organizational boundaries for purposes of analysis; and (2) how to target one or more levels of organization for performance intervention. In fact, what may be required in light of this dilemma is a focused reassessment of current theory and practice. Accordingly, to address the first issue a position is developed that proposes theories from which human performance technology conventionally draws, primarily behavioral psychology and cognitive information processing, are myopic in perspective. From the standpoint of these theories, knowledge is oft-conceptualized as an object, something which can be codified and transferred to enhance performance and learning. Continuing a line of thought advanced by like-minded scholars, I propose that knowledge might better be conceptualized as a process, emphasizing participation, activity, and meaning-making. Three alternative perspectives amendable to this view, communities of practice, activity theory, and institutional theory, are recruited to conduct this measured reconceptualization. Concerning the second issue, the assertion is that interventions tend to gravitate toward support of the individual absent organizational context. By contrast, the position I support maintains that attention to social and cultural features of organization is critical for any intervention proposed to improve performance. Consequently, to demonstrate how these challenges may be met, a case study portraying the distributed nature of knowledge and work among co-present and "virtual" teams is presented. The depiction of these teams, comprised of military and civilian technicians troubleshooting complex systems aboard U.S. Navy ships, is then analyzed and explained from the three alternative perspectives. To conclude, insights gained from the case study examination are used to inform the development of knowledge management strategies for intervention. In line with the direction of this study, solutions are formulated to account for social and cultural features of organization, i.e., context. Thus, the objective of this dissertation is to reveal two salient challenges to HPT and then demonstrate how they might be dealt with in theory and practice.