Speaker Bio
Dr Wojciech Marek Kwiatkowski is a Lecturer in Business and Management at the School of Business & Creative Industries, University of the West of Scotland. Having become disillusioned with managerialist accounts of organisational life in course of completing his PhD at the Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, he now draws on practice theorising to explore organisational knowledge and learning, technology design, effects of new technologies on work and organising, and the power relations inherent in all of them. He also has an interest in scrutinising the harmony and dissonance between scholarly accounts of knowing and the knowing involved in research practice.
Event Summary
IT services firms fall underneath the umbrella of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms. In short, such firms can been defined as business organisations which collect, transform and apply technical and/or professional knowledge to solve strategic problems faced by their clients, who often participate in the development of the service solution (Bettencourt et al., 2002; Lehrer et al., 2012). However, the view of KIBS as ‘knowledge providers’ has been criticised for being rooted in a naïve and functional understanding of knowledge. This limitation also contributed to a rather simplistic portrayal of the service delivery process (Alvesson, 2004).
In this session, Wojciech will build on the above critique by discussing the results of an abductive analysis of the organising of service delivery in a specialist IT consultancy. With the help of three theoretical lenses derived from cognitive-subjective (e.g. Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) and practice theory-based (e.g. Lave & Wenger, 1991, Nicolini, Gherardi & Yanow, 2015) literature on organisational knowledge and learning, he will explore the messiness of IT service delivery, which stems from the uncertainty and complex power relations inherent in the knowledge and knowing involved in the service delivery process.
This is an Online Event. To get access to the link for the 'The Messiness of IT Service Delivery' seminar, please register here.
The Research Seminars are open to everyone, whether you’re part of UWS or a member of the public. You can find the full list here.
If you are interested in joining or would like more information, please contact seminar coordinator, Dr Christian Harrison: christian.harrison@uws.ac.uk