Autopoitic Knowledge Systems in Project‐based Companies

Citation

Walker, D.H.T. (2011), "Autopoitic Knowledge Systems in Project‐based Companies", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 356-359. https://doi.org/10.1108/17538371111120306

I was most fortunate to be asked by Kaj U. Koskinen to write a short foreword for his book and am happy to use much of that text for this book review. I trust that readers will go away after reading this book seeing the project management (PM) world in a different way. I am sure that readers who have a traditional view of PM developed from twentieth‐century literature will find this book an adventurous journey. This is a clearly written text. It builds upon new ways of looking at projects which are important because any discipline stays alive by reflection and by re‐framing ideas as they are challenged, argued, and clarified. Indeed, I recollect that the word “argument” is said to derive from ague (water) and the notion is to clarify through argument issues until they are as clear as (pristine) water so knowledge as argument in this context is I feel to be highly relevant. Indeed, the role of language and culture in the exchange of information and knowledge, reflection, and understanding are recurring themes captured in this book that are critical to the theory of convergence of meaning between people.

One view that has been emerging from the knowledge management (KM) and organizational learning (OL) schools of thought is that projects are knowledge factories. They are places where knowledge is created, adapted, and re‐framed as well as used to produce project outcomes. The very act of developing a project brief from an idea and then re‐framing this through collaboration into a design and then further re‐framing this knowledge by combining it with pragmatic operation knowledge from those that realize the project idea is an intensive KM process. Koskinen extends this idea and uses an autopoietic epistemology to illustrate how knowledge is perceived, created, transferred, and used in PM work. As he states at the close of Chapter 5 in this book, an autopoietic epistemology “does not claim that the world is a pre‐given, but instead that cognition is a creative function. Thus, knowledge is a result of autopoiesis, that is, of self‐production processes”. He describes autopoiesis and how this way of understanding what is going on in project work can help us better manage the environment where knowledge is used in project work to deliver the benefits that a project should be established for.

This way of understanding project work builds upon a growing evolving literature of the role of knowledge in delivering projects and their intended and unintended outcomes. The “rethinking PM” debates and investigations (Winter and Smith, 2006; Winter et al., 2006) and “making projects critical” work (Hodgson and Cicmil, 2006) as well as work on project business spearheaded by groups of researchers that have been centred around work undertaken by Karlos and Morris (2010, p. 145), also convincingly argues for appreciating the relevance of theoretically based and empirically grounded PM research that is focused upon project outcomes – and he acknowledges knowledge work as an important project process and outcome (Morris and Lock, 2004). He also highlights that KM is a field of study within PM research that has only been focused upon recently, during the start of this twenty‐first century (Morris, 2010, p. 145). All these researchers help redefine the concept of what it means to “do project work”. The autopoietic epistemology to project knowledge work resonates with me as a progressive way of more clearly seeing the reality of PM and how the PM discipline is developing. This book is very strong on theory and cites many examples from empirical studies to support the argument and discussion that this book evokes.

I will be perhaps selfish and now outline what I personally got from reading this book and hope that this resonates with many readers. As an academic teaching PM, supervising doctorates, and undertaking research, I felt this to be an advanced PM text. It moves well beyond the introduction to KM and OL that I saw entering the PM literature over the period surrounding the first decade of twenty‐first century (Jashapara, 1993; Walker and Lloyd‐Walker, 1999; Egbu et al., 2001; Prencipe and Tell, 2001; Fernie et al., 2003; Sense, 2003; Peansupap, 2004; Dainty et al., 2005; Maqsood et al., 2007) to mention just a few salient examples of sources. Chapters 6 and 7 of this book provide much useful discussion on more familiar aspects of KM and OL, and this is substantially extended in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 has a focus on knowledge flows in a PM context, building upon ideas proposed with more general management contexts by Bontis et al. (2002), Crossan et al. (1999) and Lawrence et al. (2005). Chapter 10 puts the project‐based company as an autopoietic knowledge system into a PM context. This autopoietic project‐based firm view of KM and OL had been largely unrepresented in the PM literature until this book.

The autopoietic epistemology also resonates with me because I recently supervised a doctorate where her research thesis theme shifted from a more traditional quality management and change management focus to one of understanding the way that culture underpins the construal of meaning, and how knowledge was shared in a highly challenging multi‐cultural Middle Eastern context. This work of Koskinen, which is based upon many years of refinement in using an autopoietic epistemology with his colleagues (cited quite liberally throughout this book) and other work such as Small's (2009) thesis, is forging an exciting new way of understanding PM work and the nature of projects.

This book moves the agenda for seeing KM in project work solidly forward. Its clear way of explaining projects from a systems‐thinking perspective is both interesting and valuable. The extensive references cited in the book also provide access to the ideas of many worthy books and papers that can be further explored by readers. I found myself chasing up many of these and will be using them in my preparation for research, teaching, and writing, so this book has proved invaluable to me.