ABSTRACT
We recently heard a story about a married couple that moved to the US. In their former country, the husband, who was an engineer, had a higher professional status than his wife, who was a physician. Most readers would likely agree that physicians in the US enjoy higher status. When the couple moved to the US this reversal of fortune strained their marriage, so the wife quit her job as a physician and became a nurse – a job with less prestige. While the patriarchal nature of these choices is troubling, the example also illustrates the ambiguous, contestable value of knowledge. From an American viewpoint, one could assume the couple’s occupational problems stem from a historic overvaluing of engineering knowledge or the undervaluing of medical knowledge in their home country. We may even feel that their perceptions were “corrected” to see it our way. This interpretation, however, begs the question, how did we come to see the physician as the more naturally valuable occupation? This example illustrates the assumption held by most approaches to knowledge in organizations – that is, knowledge has inherent value. The critical perspective on knowledge takes a different viewpoint. It sees knowledge as “an explicit social formation arrived at through value-laden social processes” (Deetz, 1995, p. 136). Knowledge is not automatically valuable, nor are certain types of knowledge more naturally valuable than others. The perceived value of some types of knowledge over others often results from participants’ practices and organizational cultural struggles. This chapter argues that the political side to organizational knowledge and its management has consequences for the relative health of organizations.
