1st Edition

Knowledge Communication in Global Organisations Making Sense of Virtual Teams

By Nils Braad Petersen Copyright 2023
    236 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    236 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    While organisations become more and more global, they also become more and more dispersed and virtual. This challenges the sense of a shared organisational identity and the ability of employees to communicate personally held knowledge. To address these challenges this book offers an innovative multidisciplinary approach to knowledge communication in global organisations. The book develops a multidisciplinary analytical lens through which to understand employee identity formations and knowledge communication practises. Using detailed analyses of interviews from a real organisation, the book builds an understanding of how 21st century employees make sense of a virtual organisational reality characterised by multiple simultaneous projects and virtual, dispersed teams. These analyses are conducted using a new discourse analysis method for analysing research interviews, Discursive Sensemaking Analysis. Using these methods and findings, researchers, project managers and HR professionals will be able to analyse their own organisations to discover how employees make sense of the complexity of 21st century global organisations.

    Chapter 1: Introduction
    Part I: Discursive Sensemaking – Foundation, theory & method
    Chapter 2: Discursive Sensemaking Analysis - a foundation
    Chapter 3: Discursive Sensemaking Analysis – a theory
    Chapter 4:  Discursive Sensemaking Analysis – a method
    Part II:  Multidisciplinary perspective on knowledge communication practices in virtual teams
    Chapter 5: Challenges and opportunities of virtual work in global organisations
    Chapter 6: A vocabulary for describing virtual knowledge communication
    Chapter 7: Knowing as learning in Communities of Practice (CoP)
    Chapter 8: Professional identity as (D)iscursive construction
    Chapter 9: Relationships supporting virtual knowledge communication
    Chapter 10: Conclusion and discussion of theory and findings

    Biography

    Nils Braad Petersen holds a PhD in Business Communicating from Aarhus University, Denmark.