Three Kinds of Management Knowledge

If consultants are allotted to the significant economic role as discussed above, a discussion of their kind of knowledge seems more than appropriate. Blackler (1995) points out that individuals obtain their knowledge through culturally located systems. Based on an extensive literature review of knowledge in organizations, he suggests that more attention needs to be drawn to the dynamics of the systems through which knowing is accomplished, since knowing is not only provisional and pragmatic, but also situated in and mediated through activity systems (that is, “located in time and space and specific to particular contexts”; “manifest in systems of language, technology, collaboration and control”; Blackler 1995: 1039–1041). In addition, it has been suggested that the acquisition of knowledge coincides with processes of identity formation, for which the inherent goals, language, logic, and power relations of the activity system in which knowledge is acquired are most relevant (Lave and Wenger 1991; Contu and Willmott 1999). The language managers speak, and the socialization they acquire in their organization, does in the long run hardly allow them to maintain a cognitive identity independent of their setting within the organization.^[1] The argument is that different institutions and organizational contexts bring about different types of knowledge.

Our suggestion is to broadly distinguish between three institutions, or activity systems, in which managing is taught and learned and in which individuals inevitably become familiar with the topics and terms circulating in the public sphere of management. We suggest distinguishing among