Towards Constructionist Organizational Date Mining (ODM): Changing the Focus from Technology to Social Construction Knowledge

This chapter addresses the definition of organizational data mining (ODM) practices that leverage knowledge creation in organizations. It argues that knowledge resides in human minds and it is created by the continuous action and interaction happening in specific social contexts. Knowledge has a rational and an emotional foundation. When represented, knowledge becomes information that shapes the action and interaction by which individuals and communities create their specific knowledge. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the advantages of adopting a constructionist approach and to present some constructionist guidelines to assist the definition of ODM practices that leverage knowledge creation in organizations. Towards Constructionist Organizational Data Mining 301 Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. INTRODUCTION The creation of scientific and organizational knowledge is guided by the assumptions its creator holds about the nature of the studied reality, the validity of knowledge and the methods and techniques to be used to assist the process. Traditionally, it has been assumed that an organization and the business in which it is engaged have an objective existence that can be known from an independent and neutral viewpoint. Knowledge is created to assist the decision-making, the definition of strategies and the organizational change. Nevertheless, organizations can also be understood as socially constructed realities. They are, then, seen as subjective in nature, since they do not exist apart from their members and other stakeholders. Attached to these ontological perspectives on organizations are specific epistemological and methodological assumptions that provide different ways of creating knowledge about organizational phenomena. The next section explores two perspectives on knowledge creation, presenting the advantages and drawbacks of adopting either one of them. Whatever the paradigm used to guide the creation of knowledge, the process unfolds at two levels: individual and social. At the individual level, the intending knower, through processes such as cognition, action, interaction and emotion, actively creates knowledge. At the social level, people develop shared knowledge, when they are actively involved in the construction of something external and sharable. This chapter details these two levels of knowledge creation. In the last two sections of the chapter, the constructionist perspective on knowledge creation is used to highlight some problems associated with the current practices in ODM, and some constructionist guidelines to assist the definition of ODM practices that leverage knowledge creation in organizations are presented. The chapter is structured with the aim of challenging the much advanced idea that knowledge can be elicited from organizational actors and stored in repositories, assuming an independent existence from those who create it. This idea, true or false, is assumed by most existing frameworks for software and requirements engineering (Finkelstein, 2000). In this chapter, we argue that knowledge resides in human minds, and it is created by the continuous action and interaction happening in specific social contexts. Knowledge has a rational and an emotional foundation. It has an inherently tacit nature and is made explicit in language, through the myriad of linguistic artifacts at the disposal of organizational actors. When represented, knowledge becomes information that shapes the action and interaction by which individuals and communities create their specific knowledge. We also argue that ODM can be designed to assist the social construction of knowledge. THE PROCESS OF KNOWLEDGE CREATION Scientific or organizational knowledge creation has been addressed from different perspectives along the history of science and, in particular, of social sciences. The process is guided by the set of values, beliefs and norms shared by the members of the 302 Ramos & Carvalho Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. community to which the creator of this knowledge belongs, that is, it is guided by the adopted paradigm (Lincoln & Guba, 2000). The adopted paradigm determines how the nature of the studied reality is understood, the criteria that will be used to assess the validity of the created knowledge and the construction and selection of methods and techniques to structure and support the creation of knowledge. This set of ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions that characterize the paradigm one implicitly or explicitly uses to make sense of the surrounding reality is the cultural root of the intellectual enterprises. Those assumptions constrain the accomplishment of activities, such as construction of theories, definition of inquiry strategies, interpretation of perceived phenomena and dissemination of knowledge (Schwandt, 2000). The Objective Reality Traditionally, social realities have been assumed to have an objective nature. Assuming this viewpoint, the knowledge we possess about things, processes or events that occur regularly under definite circumstances should be an adequate representation of them. Knowledge is the result of a meticulous, quantitative and objective study of the phenomenon of interest. Its aim is to understand the phenomenon in order to be able to anticipate its occurrence and to control it. In this sense, knowledge is discovered and developed by successive testing of new hypotheses. Truth is a matter of verifying or refuting the hypotheses, adequately applying the right method to guide the study of things, processes or events. Thus, developed knowledge is independent of the knower. When developed explanations are empirically tested, and, if they prove effective in predicting the occurrence of phenomena in other settings, they can be generalized to all situations in which the phenomenon occurs under similar circumstances. The above paragraphs summarize the core assumptions guiding the discovery of scientific knowledge in the last four centuries of human history and Western culture. The creation and management of organizational and business knowledge is also strongly influenced by this paradigm. The expressions “knowledge discovery” and “knowledge capture” are often used in the literature addressing the issues relevant to organizational knowledge management. These expressions are rooted in the assumption that an organization and the business in which it is engaged have an objective existence that can be known from an independent and neutral standing point. In order to understand organizations and businesses, the intending knower creates models of processes, resources, events and their interconnections. These models are empirically tested, and, then, they are used to support the decision-making, the definition of strategies and the organizational change. Facts, models, best practices and the results of decisions, strategies and social change can be stored for future use, informing new decisions, plans and changes (Sekaran, 1992; Palmer & Hardy, 2000). All this means that knowledge is viewed as independent of the knower and of the organizational or business reality that it represents. It is understood as an invaluable organizational resource that can be extracted from the knower and made available to others. It provides strategic advantage, when it is delivered in time to people that need it. Another aspect that emerges from this perspective is that knowledge is understood as fairly stable and consensual, so it can be stored to be used later on by different organizational actors in different situations. Towards Constructionist Organizational Data Mining 303 Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. Based on these assumptions, information technologies have been used to develop knowledge management tools that should support effective creation, capture, storage and delivery of knowledge (Nemati, Steiger, Iyer & Herschel, 2002). Limitations of Objectivism This objectivist view of knowledge and its creation has some limitations: a) It assumes that when presented with facts, organizational actors will reach consensual interpretations and views. However, it may very well be that “. we can only see what fits into our mental space, and all description includes interpretations as well as sensory reporting” (Gould, 1998, p. 72). This accounts well for the difficulty in reaching consensus in organizations, even when confronted with the same information about events or processes (Sparrow, 1998). Our mental spaces are constructed and reconstructed along stages of socialization that occur in childhood, in learning role-specific knowledge and the professional language associated with it and in interactions with others. Our mental constructs define what we see as reality. Because individuals have different life experiences, it is not surprising that different organizational actors see different realities. When a common view of the reality is developed, this may not be related with some intrinsic meaning of the available information, but because individuals who interact for some time and extensively in similar social contexts, as is the case of people working in the same organization, develop similar mental constructs and end up seeing similar things. However, this is not true for situations such as when new organizational members interpret the stored information, when people subjected to recent or restricted learning interpret the information or when the stored information is interpreted in the ever-changing contexts of some organizations. b) It assumes that knowledge has a stable nature. However, stable knowledge creates stable ways of u