Relational capital in a high-tech organization: An ethnographic exploration

This critical ethnographic study of the shared services corporate organization of a {dollar}40 billion computer company (Hewlett-Packard) explores issues of emancipation, power, seduction, and learning within the organization entry process. The relationship between these issues is illuminated by participant observation of entrants actively and socially discovering/constructing their own organizational reality.; Links are drawn between the more recent fields of knowledge management, organization learning, and critical theory, innovation and organization culture. Critical theorists suggest that past directions in organization and management theory have made continuing attempts but little real progress toward true emancipation. Ethnographic fieldwork is employed to produce a greater understanding of how learning is experienced during the process of organization entry. A 3-month participant-observation period and informant interviews are used to examine opportunities for constructing meaning. Current literature treats socialization as a dynamic, active process which can be viewed as multiple subcultures in the form of communities of practice. Workplace learning is examined from the concept of legitimate peripheral participation. This concept examines how meaning, identity, and learning are formed as a function of joining communities of practice.; Major findings include the need for a clearer emphasis on the primacy of relationships, relational knowledge, and what is coined "relational capital" in order to better understand the process of organizational learning. The process of gaining social competence, legitimate membership, and visibility is found to also carry the potential paradox of suppressing generative learning.; The contemporary rhetoric of the value of the informal, organic networked, or postmodern organization is found to be oversimplified and potentially misleading. It is suggested that a strategic tension or "ontological oscillation" between an emphasis on objects and an emphasis on relationships can provide for organizational vigor and renewal. The concept of emancipation is found to be complex, recursive, highly contextual, and often paradoxical in nature. Informality is rejected as an organizational panacea to provide true emancipation. Practical implications include the potential to transform current entry practices that contain mechanistic assumptions to the use of a constructivist approach that actively supports knowledge work and learning as a way of being.