Knowledge, Organisational Context and Institutional Forces: Knowledge Sharing in Ikea and Sca

2 INTRODUCTION In tandem with the increasing interest in knowledge management and organisational learning, knowledge sharing has received strong attention among companies and academics over the last years. Sharing knowledge internally in organisations is often a key concern, and a central means to reap benefits of knowledge and learning. The rationale behind internal knowledge sharing in comparison to e.g. education or other forms of acquisition of knowledge, is cost efficiency, a higher degree of trust (e.g. Inkpen & Tsang, 2005), and the possibility to generate knowledge that is idiosyncratic to a specific organisation, hence providing uniqueness which can lead to sustained competitive advantage (e.g. Barney, 1991). However, knowledge sharing is complicated because it depends on a range of matters relating to knowledge itself, organisational structure and relations, and on the will of people to partake in knowledge sharing. Considering theory on success and failure factors, however, empirical work strongly emphasises cognitive issues (such as tacitness, absorptive capacity, causal ambiguity, cognitive variety and more) as explanatory factors. Other groups of factors, such as organisational context or institutional forces (e.g. individual and group motivation, and norms and values) are addressed more scarcely. With this paper we want to balance the picture, and discuss not just cognitive factors but also the impact of organisational and institutional factors. The purpose of the paper is to increase the understanding of how organisational context and institutional forces, in parallel with cognitive issues, impact firm-internal knowledge sharing in multinational corporations (MNC). The following section discusses factors that MNC will have to manage and deal with in their endeavours to distribute and share knowledge internally in their organisations. The empirical case studies are then presented, based on the relevant constructs identified in the theoretical part. The paper centres upon two qualitative case studies, furniture giant IKEA, and European paper packaging leader SCA Packaging, and their efforts to share knowledge across hundreds of local units worldwide. In the case of IKEA, the key concern is to make sure new stores across the world adhere to core IKEA principles, work methods and 3 standard offerings while still adapting to local market preferences. In the SCA case, the challenge lies in distributing experiences and hardcore production knowledge across 250 relatively autonomous profit centre packaging plants in Europe. Finally, lessons learned from the two cases are compared with theory and key observations are highlighted in order to discuss and extend current theory. …