SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Business Administration
No 2006:2:
Boundaryless Management - Creating, transforming and using knowledge in inter-organizational collaboration. A literature review
Jesper Blomberg ()
and Andreas Werr ()
Abstract: Current literature on organizations often argues that
firms are becoming increasingly dependent on knowledge residing outside
their own boundaries requiring organizations to increase their
entrepreneurial abilities and make their boundaries more flexible and
permeable. This paper reviews the literature on what might be called
interorganizational knowledge work. Implied in this focus is an assumption
of clear organizaitonal boundaries. Rather than taking these boundaries and
their importance for granted, the current review, however, aims at
relativizing these boundaries. By focusing the empirical phenomenon of
collaboration between individuals in different organizations, four
different streams of literature with different constructions of the
organizational boundary and its importance were identified: the literature
on learning in alliances and joint ventures, the literature on
collaboration in industrial networks, the literature on social networks and
communities of practice and finally the literature on geographical clusters
and innovation systems. The above four streams of the literature are
reviewed with a special focus on the following three questions: 1. What is
the role of (organizational) boundaries in interorganizational knowledge
work? 2. What do we know about how these boundaries can be overcome? 3.
What are the implications for managing interorganizational knowledge work
spelled out in the literature?
Keywords: Interorganizational collaboration; Knowledge Management; Literature review; (follow links to similar papers)
35 pages, January 27, 2006
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