The Laws of the Knowledge Workplace ― Changing Roles and the Meaning of Work in Knowledge-intensive Environments

In The Laws of the Knowledge Workplace, Dr Jemielniak has collected research-based chapters providing deep, interdisciplinary insight into knowledge professions, addressing issues of professional identity, emotion, power and authority, trust and indoctrination, and management behaviour. This leads to an examination of issues related to time and work scheduling and its bearing on play, family, symbolic sacrifices, and employee burn-out. In particular, it delves into the identity shifts between knowledge workers and managers, nepotism and turnover intentions among knowledge workers, the implementation of engineering projects, coordination problems in offshore production systems, leadership in virtual teams, decision support systems; taking into account the moral aspects of consequences, netnography as a tool for studying knowledge work, and innovative networks in the aviation industry. The accounts and studies in this book come from management, organization studies, sociology, and anthropology of work perspectives and are fully international in scope. They highlight the scale of the serious changes in occupational roles and to the meaning of work that is taking place in knowledge-intensive environments and give a pointer to what might constitute good and bad management practice in knowledge-intensive companies.

Dariusz Jemielniak is an associate professor at Kozminski University. He heads up the Center for Research on Organizations and Workplaces (CROW). He was a visiting scholar at Cornell University (2004-2005), Harvard University (2007, 2011-2012), and University of California, Berkeley (2008). He is an elected member of the Young Scholar's Academy of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research interests include knowledge work, open collaboration projects, and higher education critical management studies. His recent publications include an ethnographic analysis of the Wikipedia community (Common Knowledge?, 2014 Stanford University Press) and an ethnographic study of software engineers (The New Knowledge Workers, 2012 Edward Elgar Publishing).