Knowledge Management and the Contested Ground of the 'Professional' within a Professionalised Call Centre

We are said to be living in a new and global ‘knowledge economy’ where individuals and organisations are urged to change their way of working, learning and living. Nevertheless there are limitations and contradictions when it comes to managing knowledge, let alone making sense of knowledge management in the context of organisational practice. This paper traces the development of a knowledge management project within a publicly funded UK based call centre offering health advice. Discussions of knowledge management have been dominated by prescriptive and managerialist approaches that ignore organisational politics and the impact of knowledge management on the labour process. These issues are placed at the centre of the account. In this the tensions between the need to enrol professional expertise in the workplace matched against changing managerial practices which may be argued to lead to the degradation of this expertise and consequently be severely limiting to the sustainable development of knowledge management as a durable tool of organizational development.