Knowledge and Organization

Increasingly, both practitioners and theorists put forward " knowledge " as a deux ex machina for achieving competitiveness. Obviously, in a general sense, all firms or organizations may be said to operate on knowledge in developing their strategies, deciding on a division of labour, etc. (Blackler, 1995). This is true about mechanistic bureaucracies as well as more organic or flexible organisations. In the paper a basic epistemological framework is used in order to track and distinguish between different types of knowledge organizations. In the analysis we identify what are the knowledge relevant characteristics of the ideal typical bureaucracy, as well as of two other ideal type organizations. Among these we first discuss the conception of the organization as a " knowledge communities " , resonating the ideas of Inspired by empirical studies of project-based firms, we then suggest that firms might also take on the character of " knowledge collectivities ". In our view, these two lastmentioned types are often mixed together in the literature and we argue that separating them as ideal types would benefit analysis.