ORGANISATIONAL UNITS AND THEIR BOUNDARIES

Along with the modern notion of organisation even the boundaries related to the organisational units have been brought under the spotlight. Traditionally the focus of investigation has been on the bounded and formal units like a team or a fi xed or-ganisational entity or the whole organisation. Describing the oror-ganisational units and their boundaries is indeed much more complicated than has habitually been assumed by many organisational theorists. Under this title I have used Tuomi’s (1999) ideas on how bounded or open certain organisational units of analysis are. Tuomi (1999, p.

261) claims that organisations actually have a multitude of units of analysis that need to be taken into account and that several units of analysis need to be considered when intelligent organisations are discussed.⁸ In the context of this study it is interesting to shed a light on what the boundaries of these different conceptualizations are like.

8. Tuomi’s (1999) attempt in his dissertation was basically to come up with a novel approach to organisational knowledge management. (Knowledge management in itself can be considered a rather contradictory concept; Knowledge is fl uid and cannot be “managed”.) He discusses how the views based on traditional information processing understanding dramatically lack views that bring into the picture the dynamism and unpredictability of organisational knowing. Tuomi combines phenomenological and constructivistic views on intelligence, sociohistorical and developmental views, social systems using autopoietic theory and Luhmann’s theory of social systems. He develops this idea through studying various conceptualiza-tions of organisational knowledge creation communities.

Table 2 shows one view of the bounded and open units of analysis on different levels proposed by Tuomi (1999, p. 261).

Bounded Open

Unit Individual Human-in-society

Unit group Team Community

Meta-unit Organisation Society

Table 2. Levels of analysis and bounded and open units (Tuomi, 1999, p. 261)

The table above suggests that some of the units are bounded, meaning that they are conceptualized as autonomous entities that are agents for action. Such bounded units can be viewed as causal agents, and we can attribute responsibilities, goals and effects for them. Open units are, by contrast, extended and unbounded. Their membership is fl uid and not well defi ned, and they have fuzzy boundaries. In addition, open units are open because they “couple lower units with higher-order units.” Tuomi claims that open units are unbounded in two directions: “horizontally, as their membership is defi ned as various grades of centrality and perhipheriality; and vertically, as they connect units and meta-level systems.” Tuomi writes that when people usually con-sider social agency, we normally use bounded constructs. Using them, people tend to emphasise social units as tools that are able to accomplish certain actions. He further claims that fundamentally all units are open because even bounded units are essentially artifi cial abstractions from the underlying social systems. Tuomi’s point in his disserta-tion was that when analyzing organisadisserta-tional intelligence and knowledge, we need to start predominantly from the unbounded concepts (ibid, pp. 261-262). Tuomi’s (p.

269) view is clearly that even communities of practice defi ned by Lave and Wenger (see e.g. Lave and Wenger, 1991) form part of the group of bounded communities.

It is indeed true that Lave’s and Wenger’s interpretation of communities of practice leads to relatively stable communities, where knowledge creation is mainly about appropriating of already existing knowledge. In communities of practice, learning is about socialization to existing practices. Thus, “community” in Table 2 is a much wider concept than the bounded community of practice.

Tuomi defi nes a social system as an entity that comprises fractal communities or humans-in-society. A fractal community is an “entity that recursively consists of fractal communities or simple communities”. A minimal social system is a single com-munity and in general a set of overlapping communities. A team is a group of more than one individual who share a common goal and who join their efforts to attain that goal. From the team members’ perspective, their common goals are motives that generate activity. Tuomi states that the formation of bounded social units can be seen as a mechanism for intentional manipulation of the activity structure. He points out that the bounded units like teams are not social units in the sense that they could be

ele-ments of a meaning processing system. Tuomi defi nes organisation as a community that has a legal identity and organisational motives. Although the organisation itself is not a social system, it exists in the ecology of communities that are components of social systems. The organisation itself is one community, that of its membership.

(Tuomi, 1999, p. 262)

Tuomi’s idea is to study the link between social communities and knowledge crea-tion. He studies social units that underlie organisational knowledge creation and can be understood as different types of knowledge communities. Using Nonaka’s & Konno’s (1998) idea of ba, Lave’s & Wenger’s (1991) idea of community of practice, Fleck’s (1979) idea of thought community, activity theoretical concepts (see e.g. Engeström, 1987) and change laboratory (see e.g. Virkkunen et al., 1997) he has come up with a classifi cation of different types of knowledge creation communities (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Different types of knowledge creation communities (adapted from Tuomi, 1999, p. 273)⁹

Tuomi (1999, p. 263-275) classifi es the focal unit of knowledge creation according to two characteristics. First, the classifi cation is done based on whether the unit of knowledge creation is institutionalized, stable or transient. Secondly, the communities may also be conceptualized as homogenous or heterogeneous. In the latter type of community the members have different areas of expertise and in the former type the members share the same type of expertise. In Tuomi’s view, the more transient and uninstitutionalised the community, the more knowledge creation is bound to take place.

9. To Tuomi’s picture (1999, p. 273) I have added the two main classes: the variety of perspectives and the instability of the structures (of knowledge creation communities).

Activity system

Communities of practice are homogenous entities that maintain and reproduce

“social stocks of knowledge” (Tuomi, 1999, p. 264). Newcomers are socialized into a specifi c community of practice through legitimate peripheral participation (Lave

& Wenger, 1991). The idea of thought community is very similar to that of Lave and Wenger. A thought community (Fleck, 1979, pp. 102-104 in Tuomi, 1999, pp.

267-268) is created when a relatively stable structure of meaning is established. A thought community reproduces itself through its continuous regeneration of mean-ing. A thought community rejects meanings that do not fi t with its thought style. Ba is a dynamic interaction space where new knowledge emerges (Nonaka & Konno, 1998, Nonaka et al., 2000). Their main interest is in institutionalizing the knowledge crea-tion process itself. Ba is a certain space and time for the concentracrea-tion of resources to create new knowledge. There are different types of bas and they may be either homogenous or heterogeneous. Activity systems are conceptualizations that have an underlying division of labour where subject, object and community are closely interrelated. Activity theoretic view focuses on the link between creativity, learning and practice (Engeström, 1987).

Change laboratory and developmental work research (see e.g. Ahonen & Virkkunen, 2005) are interventionist situations that bring together representatives from several interrelated activity systems to identify contradictions between them and to develop novel tools and practices to enhance activity.

The characterization of communities based on homogenous and heterogeneous communi-ties is important in practice, as it implies that members of a community either share or do not share a common system of meanings. In Bakhtinian term, a community of practice, for example, has a shared linguistic genre, whereas an activity system has to negotiate and translate between different genres. The Luhmannian social system can then be interpreted as a genre, or a homogenous community. Indeed, using the distinction between heteroge-neous and homogenous communities we can see that whereas the Luhmannian concept of social meaning processing may enable us to explain what it is that happens inside a ba, it need to be combined with the idea of object related activity to explain productive social practice. (Tuomi, 1999, p. 275)

Tuomi’s compilation and comparison of various organisational units of analysis are brought to this study fi rstly to shed light on the boundaries around the various con-ceptualizations of organisational knowledge creation communities. The other reason is to show the interrelatedness of various levels of knowledge creation communities.¹⁰ 10. Social systems are not visible in this table; they are societal systems that have developed to distinctive meaning processing

systems along time. It is, however, possible that certain social systems are more visible in certain organisational functions, some organisational functions can even be organised around social systems. In that sense some organisational functions can be relatively homogenous on what comes to the communication and identity. One could even argue that activity systems in a single organisational function could be interpreted to be rather homogenous if deemed on a superfi cial level based on educational background. Naturally personal biographies entail a great deal of multivoicedness as emphasised by Engeström, 2001, for example.

After dealing with the emerging boundaryless organisational contexts, I will move on to examine what “boundaryless work” is all about in Chapter 3. This is done by studying the very concept of boundary, boundary work and boundary practices.

Moreover, the implications of increasing “boundarylessness” to people’s job roles, careers and features of expert work are dealt with.