Communicating organizational knowledge in a sociomaterial network: The influences of communication load, legitimacy, and credibility on health care best-practice communication

This study investigates how best-practice knowledge is communicated in an organizational network. Using sociomateriality as an ontological foundation, I conceptualized knowledge communication as occurring in an organizational network in which the actors are both people and artifacts. I drew on propositions from organizational learning theory and institutional theory to investigate how three forms of sociomaterial agency---the communication load of knowledge consumers, and the legitimacy and credibility of knowledge sources---influenced the structure of the knowledge network. I tested these hypothesized influences using data on the communication of new cholesterol treatment guidelines within an organizational network of primary care physicians and knowledge artifacts. Results from the estimation of recently-developed exponential random graph models for multilevel networks indicated that the legitimacy of the organizational authors of best-practice knowledge exerted a significant influence on network structure, whereas communication load had no effect. The results also offered qualified support for the premise that in many empirical contexts, multilevel sociomaterial networks hold the potential to explain more variance in the structure of knowledge communication than unipartite or bipartite networks alone.