The Sociological Tradition and the Spread and Institutionalization of Knowledge for Action

The strong interest that business knowledge has prompted in the last years was noted at the beginning of the Introduction to this volume as well as the plurality of approaches adopted in trying to fathom it. I also commented on the particular institutional perspective adopted by this volume. In this chapter, I would like to elaborate on the two sociological traditions that have paved the way for the widespread focus on business knowledge, its epistemology, and on the social processes involved in its production, transmission and utilization: on the one hand, the Neo-Institutional School, which has brought knowledge into the centre stage of Organizational Theory, and on the other, the Sociology of Knowledge, which has left behind the more ideologized discussions of decades ago, and focused on the institutional conditions for the social acceptance of ideas. These two domains make the diffusion and consumption of business knowledge a theoretically framed topic, while providing a basic set of variables — proposed and refined by scholars over time — for examining it.