The Networking Knowledge Worker, Technology Appropriationand the Shaping of Learning Practices

This article reports on an ethnographic study performed in a large and distributed, knowledge intensive ICT company. It gives an in-depth account of the introduction of virtual communities in this organization and what happened afterwards. When confronted with organizational change ideas such as virtual community, people make sense of and appropriate these ideas to make them ‘their own.’ We delve deeply into the arguments and motives behind the appropriations of the company’s employees, which results into four generalized appropriation patterns. These appropriations patterns indicate that people respond to change ideas by comparing the behavioral norms and essences of professional selves prescribed in these ideas with how they naturally engage in practices of social networking, learning, and professional identity construction. This behavior not only explains their degrees of participation and nonparticipation in the virtual communities created, but it also reveals how employees shape their work and learning practices.