Roell on Knowledge Worker

Martin Roell has an extended and thoughtful blog entry on the term “knowledge worker”, Das E-Business Weblog: Terminology: “Knowledge Worker”. It starts with a reaction I had to his paper that I blogged earlier (see Roell: Distributed KM.) He then surveys some deeper discussions of what is at stake and ends up with a pragmatic point about communication in business (which he, not I has to do) and the importance of being understood by managers. Setting aside the pragmatics, here is a list of alternative terms that overlap in interesting ways,

  1. business person (what’s the difference between knowledge worker and business person?)
  2. epistemologist (someone who studies knowledge)
  3. philosopher (someone who loves wisdom, but doesn’t necessarily possess it)
  4. sophist (someone who thinks he is wise, but probably isn’t)
  5. office worker
  6. clerk
  7. computer (in the old sense of someone who does computations)
  8. manager


Roell links to an interesting musing by Jim McGee on Knowledge work as craft work. In particular McGee writes about “the importance of visibility in craft work” and what that might mean for knowledge work.

McGee, in turn, links to The Social Life of Paper by Malcolm Gladwell in the The New Yorker (2002-03-25). Having a messy office myself, I appreciated the following,

But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.

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