Between form and perform: the knowledge artifact in organizations and IT design

Knowledge Artifact is an analytical construct by which analysts, researchers and designers from different disciplines usually denote those material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use, sharing and representation of knowledge. This makes this concept central to understanding organizational ecologies and to the design of IT artifacts that support the knowledge-related activities mentioned above. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing IS literature by providing a conceptual mapping for the interpretation of the heterogeneous contributions on this concept in the specialist literature. Our findings suggest that currently this term denotes a multi-pole and open-ended definition, which several disciplines contribute to shape from their peculiar perspective and to their aims. That notwithstanding, it is possible to detect a spectrum of stances between two main extremes: one pole, which we denote as representational, focusing on knowledge as an "object per se", that is as something that can be either true or false, represented in formal ways, and be stored, transmitted and produced through computational inference; and another pole, which we denote as socially situated, focusing on knowledge as social practice, that is an epiphenomenon of a situated, context-dependent and performative interaction of human actors through and with "objects of knowing". Our study tries to gather complementary ideas of knowledge under a unifying model, which draws upon theories and reviews from many fields. Our main purpose is to shed light on the multiple ways these ideas can inform the "reification" of knowledge into IT artifacts, and investigate whether these seemingly irreconcilable positions can bring value to the IS design research.