The DOI matches its Crossref record; 9 of the 9 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of Understanding on a Production Floor
Abstract
This paper suggests that knowledge is shared in organizations through the transformation of occupational communities' situated understandings of their work. In this paper, I link the misunderstandings between engineers, technicians, and assemblers on a production floor to their work contexts, and demonstrate how members of these communities overcome such problems by cocreating common ground that transforms their understanding of the product and the production process. In particular, I find that the communities' knowledge-sharing difficulties are rooted in differences in their language, the locus of their practice, and their conceptualization of the product. When communication problems arise, if members of these communities provide solutions which invoke the differences in the work contexts and create common ground between the communities, they can transform the understandings of others and generate a richer understanding of the product and the problems they face.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The Discovery of Grounded Theory; Strategies for Qualitative Research
Glaser, B. G., Strauss, A. L., & Strutzel, E. (1968) · Nursing Research · doi:10.1097/00006199-196807000-00014 · Cited by 39,449
A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation
Nonaka, I. (1994) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.5.1.14 · Cited by 17,809
Knowledge of the firm, combinative capabilities, and the replication of technology
Kogut, B., & Zander, U. (1992) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.3.3.383 · Cited by 12,939 · cited 2×
“While tacit knowledge is clearly an element of the work of occupational communities (Polanyi 1958, 1967; Kogut and Zander 1992), this study demonstrates that the manner in which people communicated impacted the incorporation of knowledge into the work of others.”
BackgroundOrganizational learning: The contributing processes and the literatures
Huber, G. P. (1991) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.2.1.88 · Cited by 8,072
Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm
Szulanski, G. (1996) · Strategic Management Journal · doi:10.1002/smj.4250171105 · Cited by 7,839
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life
Lave, J. (1988) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511609268 · Cited by 5,148
Accelerating Adaptive Processes: Product Innovation in the Global Computer Industry
Eisenhardt, K. M., & Tabrizi, B. N. (1995) · Administrative Science Quarterly · doi:10.2307/2393701 · Cited by 2,426 · cited 1×
“…in analyzing product development and manufacturing firms, industry watchers suggest that managing knowledge through the use of concurrent engineering and cross-functional teams will improve time to market, technology transfer, and innovation (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi 1995, Leonard and Sensiper 1998).”
BackgroundOrganizational routines are stored as procedural memory: Evidence from a laboratory study
Cohen, M. D., & Bacdayan, P. (1994) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.5.4.554 · Cited by 1,393
Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer
Johnson, J. (1988) · Social Problems · doi:10.2307/800624 · Cited by 892
Cited by
Boundary Crossing and Boundary Objects
Akkerman, S. F., & Bakker, A. (2011) · Review of Educational Research · doi:10.3102/0034654311404435 · Cited by 2,361
Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory
Feldman, M. S., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2011) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.1100.0612 · Cited by 1,753
10 Coordination in Organizations: An Integrative Perspective
Okhuysen, G. A., & Bechky, B. A. (2009) · Academy of Management Annals · doi:10.5465/19416520903047533 · Cited by 998
Self-citationCoordination in Fast-Response Organizations
Faraj, S., & Xiao, Y. (2006) · Management Science · doi:10.1287/mnsc.1060.0526 · Cited by 935
Kellogg, K. C., Orlikowski, W. J., & Yates, J. (2006) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.1050.0157 · Cited by 802
Metadata
- Authors
- Bechky, B. A.
- Venue
- Organization Science
- Published
- 2003-06
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 312-330
- ISSN
- 1047-7039 (ISSN-L)
- 1526-5455
- OpenAlex
- W2131145879
- Cited by
- 1,729
- References
- 9
- FWCI
- 81.09
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of Understanding on a Production Floor. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1287/orsc.14.3.312.15162
- The paper
- Bechky, B. A. (2003). Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of Understanding on a Production Floor. Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.14.3.312.15162
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.