The Laws of the Knowledge Workplace

’The Laws of the Knowledge Workplace is not just another publication on a fashionable topic. It goes beyond the easy introduction of the knowledge work and knowledge workers concepts. The authors dig deeper, and in research-based chapters introduce work as perceived by the knowledge workers themselves. It focuses on the ways knowledge workers define, organize and make sense of their workplace. Moreover, it presents studies from different cultural contexts, and this international perspective is still insufficiently researched and described. In my opinion this book is critical reading for anyone who wants to understand the nature, and multidimensional character of knowledge work.’ Beata Glinka, The University of Warsaw, Poland ’Knowledge workers are praised as the most value-adding group of employees, and analyzed as gurus, hired guns or warm bodies. Their diploma-wielding and cappuccino-sipping clusters advance business companies to the ranks of knowledge-intensive organizations. But do we really know what knowledge workers do when they work? Jemielniak and his authors decided to listen to their stories. Do they enjoy a chance to be creative or deplore a collapse of a distinction between work and household time? What are the managerial lingos and employee power games between clouded onliners, the wizards of the world wide web, who trust but check? Virtual teams and virtual organizing are studied along with nepotism and networking, trust and professional identities, power and roles. Speaking of the laws of knowledge work betrays ambition to go beyond the functional, neopositivist paradigm of quantitatively biased mainstream research projects. Harvard’s labor and worklife program and Kozminski’s university sabbatical are among the establishment sponsors of this mildly subversive but strongly recommended collection of studies. All of them confirm that innovation becomes increasingly a collective game and that network leadership is one