Research Interests
Knowledge Management is one of my long standing interests. In 1999 I started the Knowledge Management Hub at Viktoria Institute. Our first project was a large industrial cooperative research project: Competitive Knowledge Organizations. Today the KM Hub lives a more distributed life. You can still get access to the many publications we produced via Viktorias homepage. My take on KM is that most organizational processes are in fact knowledge processes that information technology may support or disturb. If don’t watch up, you may cut off a core knowledge flow you were not aware of when you rationalize a business procees with IT. Thus, KM is by its very nature a socio-.technical area. My KM interests today is mainly focused on narrative approaches. Read more on KM ...
Storytelling and the narrative mode of knowledge is the main angle of my KM-interest today. Knowledge encoded in narratives are interesting and useful representations of cultural aspects of organizations and embed knowledge and experience. Narratives is one (maybe the only) main way to grasp the difficult phenomena of corporate culture. And its not if a story is true that is interesting, its the impact it has. I have been working with storytelling workshops in a couple of companies together with my colleagues Magnus Bergquist and Maria Bolin, industrial PhD-student from the consultant company Guide. Read more...
Open Source is maybe the largest interest of mine. Since 2000 I have been involved in research projects on the social and organizational aspects of open source, mainly together with my colleagues Magnus Bergquist and Anna-Maria Szczepanska, Phd-student in sociology. My original angle on open source was the question of how a distributed bunch of hackers could produce such high quality software. Today the commons-based peer production mode has reached several more areas outside the software business. We have still only seen the begininning of the impact on open knowledge sharing that the Free and Opens Source Software movements have had on society.Read more...
IT, Organizations, Change and Culture are issues I have touched upon in different ways. IT and organizing has been an interest since my PhD-work on workflow systems and the langauge action approach. ITs relation to phenomena as change and culture I came across lately. Like design, change is a concept that is always there when you deal with information technology. Just like design and knowledge, change is a tricky concept, that easily vanishes or changes shape when you examine it more closely. To explore this issue I started a PhD-course in IT & Change to collaboratively investigate this issue further. Read more...
