Facilitating – or inhibiting – knowing in practice

European Journal of Information Systems (2006) 15, 441–445. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000633 It is increasingly recognized that the ability to create, use and reuse knowledge is key to organizational survival, underpinning the development of routine practices that encourage efficiency as well as innovation processes that can increase organizational flexibility (Grant, 1996). Knowledge enables the interpretation of data to provide information in a particular context or for a particular purpose (Checkland, 1981), so that information systems (both technical and social) are key to understanding knowledge processes. The Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Capabilities (OKLC) conference was set up 6 years ago to bring together scholars from different backgrounds, in particular, from the Organization Studies and Information Systems fields. The purpose was to engage in discussion and debate in considering the theoretical and practical implications of the increasing emphasis being placed on knowledge and learning in the two fields. The sixth OKLC conference was held in Boston in March 2005, with a view to providing a cross-cultural treatment of the topic area. The authors from this conference were invited to submit papers for this special issue of the European Journal of Information Systems. The call for the conference attracted 250 submissions from which, following a double-blind review process, 94 were accepted and included in the program. Following the conference, all the authors were sent an invitation to submit their paper for consideration for this special issue. Eighteen papers were submitted following this call, from which four were finally accepted and are included here. In addition, the three keynote speakers at the conference were invited to write essays, summarizing their presentations and we have included here the essays by Karl Weick andWanda Orlikowski as thought-pieces that can stimulate critical reflection and debate. In this spirit, four conference participants who had asked questions of each of these two speakers were also invited to submit comments/thoughts/reflections on these essays to help in the consideration of how the arguments in these thought-pieces might frame our future thinking. This ‘set’ of two essays and four commentaries is clearly somewhat unusual to include in a single edition of a journal. However, we thought that this format was very helpful in enabling our readers to reflect upon the different disciplinary orientations that offer insights into ‘knowing in practice’. Thus, the two keynote essays that we include here are each from a leading authority, one (Orlikowski) who takes more of an IS perspective, the other (Weick) whose orientation is derived from his OS perspective. As will be seen in the two essays, these different perspectives are very clear. Nevertheless there are some interesting intersections that are potentially the areas for more innovative and interesting future work. Likewise, the four commentators that we have chosen were selected based on their different disciplinary perspectives.