Organisational knowledge flows and structural change - the case of dispersed education organisations

Abstract

The paper studies the implications of structural change for organisational knowledge flows. A qualitative case study was carried out in two vocational education and training organisations in Finland in order to recognise how the system-level structural change has been perceived by the education managers. The paper aims to bridge a research gap in knowledge management in situations of changing organisation structures. The results reveal that the externally driven structural change has led to concurrent and somewhat conflicting organisation structures leading to distortion of knowledge flows. Administrative Bureaucracies, team adhocracies and professional autonomies favour different structures and knowledge flows. The results also show that the integration of smaller organisations into large administrative entities further complicates the flow of knowledge and amplifies management challenges relating to concurrent structures. The paper calls for better integration of knowledge management into the strategic management of knowledge-intensive education organisations. The findings provide practical support for the management of previously independent education institutes to confront the structural change towards regional and geographically dispersed actors. More generally, the discussion contributes to the discussion on managing growing knowledge-intensive organisations and knowledge work.