Introduction

The importance of managing knowledge for competitive advantage has received a considerable amount of attention in the past decade. Until fairly recently, however, comparatively little attention has been directed towards examining the specific problems associated with managing knowledge in project environments (DeFillippi, 2001; Prencipe and Tell, 2001). This is somewhat surprising, given the importance of projects in contemporary organizations (Drucker, 1993; Ekstedt et al., 1999; Hobday, 2000). However, it is less surprising perhaps when one considers that managing knowledge in a project-based setting faces particular challenges. As projects are often one-off and relatively self-contained, discontinuities are created within the organization that make it difficult to develop steady-state routines and maximize the flow of knowledge and learning between projects (DeFillippi and Arthur, 1998). In sectors such as the construction industry, which provides the case material for this chapter, these problems are compounded by the fragmentation of the project team into different professional disciplines (Bresnen, 1990). Each discipline has its own knowledge base and language, which can make the effective codification and diffusion of knowledge even more problematic.

Early debates on knowledge management (KM) centred upon the use of information technology (IT) and communication technology (Cole-Gomolski, 1997; Finerty, 1997). However, it has long been recognized that there are limitations to a purely IT-based view of knowledge codification and capture (Bijker et al., 1987; Tsoukas, 1996; Spender, 1996; Fahey and Prusak, 1998; Swan et al., 1999). Although a good deal of...