Exploring Non-Human Agency in the Organizing of a Knowledge Management Unit: A Ventriloquial Analysis of a Proposal and a Proponent's Certificate

Abstract

Knowledge management is usually studied as something people do with knowledge once an organization already exists. This study asks what non-human agents participate in bringing a knowledge management unit into being, and what do those participants accomplish. Working from the Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) and from Cooren's theory of ventriloquism, I analyzed two naturally occurring documents from the founding of a knowledge management unit at a Philippine state university—my own KM practitioner certificate and the proposal to establish the unit. Following the four-phase framework for ventriloquial analysis set out by Nathues, van Vuuren and Cooren, I identified 17 ventriloquial effects: instances in which a figure is made present and made to say or do something, together with the vent that animates it. The figures trace back to three chains of authorship, which I call the canonical, institutional and technological voices. Technical knowledge on KM is the only vent that crosses both documents, and it animates most of the figures. The non-human agents perform five things: they authorize, they bound the field, they reconstitute an organizational reality, they supply a purpose, and they defer. Technical knowledge of the field emerges as the condition on which the organizing runs, since the canonical categories that claim the university's people, outputs and losses for the unit have to be held well enough to be applied. The study adds to the work on ventriloquial analysis that deals with documentary data with no live interaction, and it also contributes to CCO through the canonical voice, as an aspect of organizing where technical knowledge of the field is required, with the KM unit as an incident of such organizing.