Architectures of Knowledge: Firms, Capabilities, and Communities

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In Architectures of Knowledge, Ash Amin and Patrick Cohendet argue that the time is right for research to explore the relationship between two other dimensions of knowledge in order to explain the innovative performance of firms: between knowledge that is 'possessed' and knowledge that is'practiced' generally within communities of like-minded employees in a firm. The impetus behind this argument is both conceptual and empirical. Conceptually, there is a need to explore the interaction of knowledge that firms possess in the form of established competencies of stored memory, with theknowing that occurs in distributed communities through the conscious and unconscious acts of social interaction. Empirically, the impetus comes from the challenge faced by firms to the hierarchically defined architecture that bring together specialized units of ((possessed)) knowledge and thedistributed and always unstable architecture of knowledge that draws on the continuously changing capacity of interpretation among actors. In this book, these questions of the dynamics of innovating/learning through practices of knowing, and the management of the interface between transactional andknowledge imperatives, are approached in a cross-disciplinary and empirically grounded manner. The book is the synthesis of an innovative encounter between a socio-spatial theorist and an economist. The book results from the delicate interplay between two very different epistemologies and consequentpositions, but which progressively converged towards what is hoped to be a novel vision. The book begins by explaining why knowledge is becoming more of a core element of the value- generating process in theeconomy, then juxtaposes the economic and cognitive theorization's of knowledge in firmswith pragmatic and socially grounded theorization's and a critical exploration of the neglected dimension of the spatiality of knowledge formation in firms. The book concludes by discussing