Reproducing knowledge: Xerox and the story of knowledge management

This paper is a commentary on discursive transformations found in stories told about Xerox’s photocopier technicians, comparing particularly Orr’s brilliant ethnographic study and a later management case study. It argues that significant shifts take place in how knowledge is understood between these accounts so that what begins as elusive, oral, improvised and social becomes increasingly presented as encodable in a structured database, countable, auditable, individualistic. These ideological transformations seem partly to be a result of the needs of the genre of case study, and partly to do with Xerox’s own historic need to rebrand itself, and simply to sell a commercial product. The paper stresses the need to capture complexity in case studies if they are to promote a realistic or critical understanding of the organisation.