Practices and Cultures of Knowledge Management

Abstract

In this paper we take a CSCW perspective on knowledge management, looking at it at the level of daily work practice in two different contexts – project management and engineering design work. Special attention is paid to the diversity of artefacts central to knowledge management. Our analysis makes use of fieldwork in two companies. We use the notion of vignettes to illustrate a variety of knowledge management issues of which we want to mainly address three: The existence of different professional cultures and their interpretation schemes and how these influence representational genres, issues of boundary management and what we describe as a fragmentation of the knowledge base, and knowledge management practices as part of cooperative work.