Chasing, Pacing or Drifting? Organisational Knowledge and Management in Consulting Engineering

This contribution discusses the knowledge production in a consulting engineering company. Consulting engineering practices and knowledge areas undergo rapid development, which make a description by discipline less obvious, but the focus here is on the production of buildings, mobilising mainly mechanical and electrical engineering, building physics, project and construction management. This kind of engineering is typically pictured as a knowledge intensive activity, but also involve large elements of routinized work such as CAD-drawing. Building on a five month emic ethnographic study, it is illustrated how the organisational knowledge production in a medium size consulting engineering company relies on a bricolage of practical experiences, formalised information, external alliances and customer demands. Several management initiatives address the production and management of knowledge. Information technology, organisation, office design, training and other human resource oriented management tools all play a role. The succession of initiatives does not take place as part of an all-encompassing strategy, although such a strategy does formally exist. Rather it mirrors conditions of possibility occurring over time and the ability to improvise by central actors. The initiatives can thus be seen as a combination of chasing options or just drifting with them and at the same time developing the internal resources as much as possible (pacing the internal options). Understanding knowledge management in this broader sense enables an analysis of what different kinds of knowledge production “deliver” under the circumstances. Theoretically the contribution builds on a critique of mainstream knowledge management positions, which picture knowledge as either a well defined tangible entity or describe how it can quickly become one. Although community of practice approaches dismantle such overly rationalistic perceptions of knowledge, they still suffer from a belief of the stability and non political features of the knowledge production. It is suggested to view the knowledge production as relying on temporary network-building related to drifting along with opportunities, problem setting and solution formulation. It implies continual reconfiguring of some elements of knowledge in coexistence with longer term and more stable basic knowledge elements. The local engineering cultures both preserve the long term elements as well as host the dynamic new ones. The cultures are characterised by an orientation towards designing with new techniques in new ways. The strong project dynamic of the company preserves and develops these cultures. Project and department managers interact with their external network constantly chasing new options of projects, and partly using them to pace certain internal competency building. It is as a totality creating a drift, which leaves the conscious top level management initiatives as a somewhat sideshow.