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Representing Organization: Knowledge, Management, and the Information Age

Book Reviews
Transforming Knowledge and Technology
Representing Organization: Knowledge, Management, and the Information Age. Simon Lilley, Geoffrey Lightfoot, and Paulo Amaral M. N.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 218 pp., ?55, ISBN 0198775415 (hbk), ?19.99, ISBN 0198775423 (pbk)

?Knowledge?, ?technology?, and ?information system? are among the top concerns of contemporary organization studies scholars. Too often, however, each term is unquestioningly de-socialized, reified, and commodified so that agency (managerial and scholarly) may be exercised through it in ways that render both the process and the entity unproblematic. Lilley, Lightfoot, and Amaral write in direct opposition to such a simplification and, in so doing, produce a treatment of organizing that holds the potential to influence a good deal of scholarship touching upon these themes. Although there is a price to be paid for problematizing these concepts (more on this below), their book provides a nuanced treatment of theory that should be widely read.
In suggesting that this work can influence scholarship, I point up a concern regarding its projected audience. According to the back cover, the book is designed as a course book for ?theoretically-informed Information and Technology courses at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels?; its inclusion of Key Themes (what one should be able to explain or do after reading) and Key Concepts at each chapter?s beginning and Discussion Questions and Suggestions for Further Reading at the end support this intent. Caution would be wise when considering this as a course book for all but the most advanced and theoretically well-read students, for two reasons.

First, the breadth of social theory and theoretical frames can be daunting, ranging from systems theory to labor process theory to actor-network theory to Baudrillard?s gigantic simulacrum to Foucault?s discipline, with relatively little explanation of how these perspectives differ from the more conventional theory that serves as standard fare in most curricula. More to the point, the theoretical discussions, while relatively short, are frequently marked by obscure passages without links to other topics in the book or currents in the larger conceptual stream.

Second, the student-oriented elements of the text are less than helpful. The Key Concepts sometimes do not figure prominently in the chapters and the Discussion Questions are often abstruse and fail to follow the chapter contents closely. Indeed, adequate considerations of some Discussion Questions would require doctoral theses. Although these concerns likely reflect my own biased conceptions of students? abilities, my reading suggests that the text?s challenges will outweigh its benefits for most students.

With this caveat out of the way, the value of this book emerges more clearly. That value, it seems to me, lies in the authors? ability to reframe and deepen scholars? understanding of knowledge, technologies, and information systems by viewing them from several novel and related perspectives. Research along these lines sorely needs the sort of conceptual augmentation provided here. The lion?s share of this work draws on the resource-based view of the firm in examining how knowledge, technologies, and information systems provide distinctive competencies and competitive advantage, but cannot explain much when it comes to organizational micropractices, the constitution of authority, or extra-organizational influences on organizing. Burgeoning critical work on these topics, especially in information systems, more frequently problematizes processes of constitution, but too often ?tilts? toward either social or technological determinism in explaining organizational structuration or control processes (Jackson et al., 2002).
Lilley et al. speak to this theoretical poverty while avoiding epistemological tilting as they advance the notion of the representation as a cornerstone in building a new foundation for the study of organization. Heavily influenced by Cooper?s (1992, 1993) work, Lilley et al. define representations as abstract or concrete patterns, pictures, or models that purport to correspond in some sense with characteristics of some other formation (MacKay, 1969). Representations, in other words, are symbolic constructions of elements of our world; they are absolutely fundamental to communication processes and, thus, to the coordination and control that comprise organizing. Although it might seem banal to anyone but the members of the Vienna Circle that organizing processes work on representations rather than on some firm ?reality?, the authors show the importance of taking the notion seriously. Following Cooper, they show that information operates fully on representations (and require an agent to meditate the partition between object and its representation), and that informating (Zuboff, 1988) is about translating recalcitrant material into malleable symbolic form through displacement, abbreviation, and remote control.
Although such claims about representation were explained well by Cooper, the authors, to their credit, do not rest there. Rather, they devote sustained attention to the connections between representation and control. These are particularly compelling when Lilley et al. address how the abbreviations that define representations are wrapped up in power struggles, how representational technologies are central to the negotiation of accountability (and they implicate managers and systems designers in this discussion), and how representational systems engender a loss of pre-representational footing that results in organizational simulacra. Information and communication technologies, as well as knowledge management systems, are the instruments and outcomes of these processes; they can initiate the organizational uncertainty they ostensibly seek to address. This creates the sort of hyperreal world Baudrillard envisioned, in which models replace the world and the simulation becomes the criterion for the real. After reading Representing Organization, one comes away convinced that examining representational practices has not only been overlooked in much research, but that attending to it presents a host of promising vistas on organizing. In addition to opening up the study of knowledge, technology, and information systems to theories gaining purchase in critical/postmodern organization studies, leading the charge with the representation construct provides a much more complex view of organizing itself.
For those seeking lessons for research, this vision demands a fine-grained analysis of organizing practices, but such analyses are largely missing among the book?s illustrative cases. The examples?which, to be fair, are intended as illustrations, not extended empirical investigations?range from consumers at a grocery chain, financial markets, users of a computer conferencing system, and a story from a novel imagining a chess match between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. The authors? desire to extend examples beyond the artificial boundaries of ?the? organization is refreshing, but the bulk of theoretical discussion points toward intra-organizational processes, often making the examples appear as odd mismatches. This is true, too, of the text?s running illustration: a study of an ?oil management system? at a refinery called ?Mexaco?, drawn from Lilley?s PhD thesis. Stretching across several chapters, the case is sometimes quite useful (e.g. chapter five?s discussion of the manufacture of uncertainty), but more often gets bogged down in attempting to explain details of practices, using site-specific acronyms, and providing extended quotes (many of which are formatted the same as the surrounding text). There are relatively few endeavors into the institutional realm when illustrating concepts (a shortcoming Washam [1997] levies at actor-network theory generally), and there are equally few attempts to extend the ideas to explicitly knowledge-based or professional service work, a natural case for a book about representation and simulation (especially for one that includes a chapter on the ?virtual organization?). Therefore, I fear that few readers will exert the effort to work through the Mexaco case and will be disappointed in the illumination offered by the others.
One representation not examined systematically in the book is the organization itself (dealt with only briefly in the last chapter). Many readers of this journal, and I assume the authors as well, would agree that organizations are textualized, symbolic constructions that have little or no materiality to them.

In this sense, work may involve tangible matter, but the organization itself is a fictional entity that depends on legal codes, mental models, practices, discourses, and other representations. As suggested above, actors always deal with a material world through representation, but that world ?remains always and inevitably beyond our reach? (p. 143); hence, engagement with (including attempts to control) the simulated, symbolic organizational ?world? is likely to prove additionally complex and confusing for actors given its utter lack of a material basis.

The authors proffer an account of representational systems taking on a life of their own, in which representations abound without recourse to Archimedean points; as a description of organizational ?reality?, this tells readers little about how organizations are constituted, how situated authorities control the representational system, or how resistance to representational positioning might proceed. Without delving in greater depth into the ontology of the organization and its distributed sites of discursive practice, however, the book can say little about these traditional concerns of critical/postmodern scholarship.
I suggested above that a significant contribution of this book is its heuristic value, since it frames issues conceptually and suggests novel avenues for research. This is most clear in the book?s final chapter, an exploration of knowledge management. It contains a fairly straightforward discussion of visions (i.e. representations) of knowledge and learning found in both mainstream literature and philosophical traditions. It also suggests, somewhat more provocatively, that our representations (e.g. metaphors) of organizations matter, and that altering representations of organizations bears implications for knowledge management and organizational learning.

The authors conclude that knowledge management, and the technologies to support it, provide the possibility for organizational transformation if representations can be productively mobilized. Although this possibility is explained in rather vague terms and there is no indication of how we could adjudicate desirable and undesirable transformation, it is undoubtedly a crucial issue for critical scholars. Understanding how such transformative potentials are mobilized, however, requires an analysis of the micro-practices that implicate and produce representations actors take to be ?practical? in dealing with undecidability (a notion they borrow from Derrida) in situated organizing. In other words, investigating technology and knowledge management requires a detailed consideration of how we accomplish contextualized knowing through representations; such a study would substantially strengthen existing work on knowledge and technology while representing another benefit of this rich theoretical perspective.
Representing Organization presents a challenge to those who study knowledge, technology, and information systems. It challenges its readers to examine the ways technological representations (as well as their own representations of organizations) constitute organizational practices and selfpropagate; it likewise challenges its readers to develop the sort of theoretical sophistication to embark on meaningful examinations of technological development and identity regulation. For these reasons, given the reservations expressed above, I believe this book should receive extensive attention in the organization studies field.

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