1 Intranets and Knowledge Management: De-centred Technologies and the Limits of Technological Discourse Sue Newell Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham, NG1 4BU. Email: sue.newell@ntu.ac.uk Harry Scarbrough Leicester Business School, Leicester University. Email: hs28@le.ec.uk & Jacky Swan, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. CV4 7AL. Email:irobjs@wbs.warwick.ac.uk Introduction An important current trend in the business environment is the tendency for applications of technology to be 'bundled' together with legitimating discourses aimed at senior management. For example, many applications of Information Technology (IT) in the early and mid-1990's were either stimulated or justified by a discourse of Business Process Reengineering (BPR), which held that old functional structures needed to be swept away in favour of streamlined 'business processes'. Although BPR was subsequently subject to scathing criticism from academic and practitioner commentators alike, the trend continues in the wake of BPR with an exponential increase in managerial interest in 'knowledge management'. The discourse of 'knowledge management' is one in which the ability to manage ‘knowledge assets’ is seen as increasingly important for organizations (Offsey, 1997). In particular, knowledge sharing across departments, functions or geographical locations is discussed as a core organizational competence for many (if not all) organizations, not just knowledge-intensive firms (Newman, 1997). The coupling of IT with these more or less nebulous concepts centring on organizational performance can be provisionally explained in a number of ways. The increasing pervasiveness and malleability of IT vastly extends the different ways in which technology can be applied to organizations - becoming increasingly implicated in organizational redesign and shifts in business strategy. These features mean that IT applications not only cut across existing managerial specialisms - creating ambiguity - but also increase levels of uncertainty about the relationship between the use of technology and the pursuit of organizational goals. The discourses first of BPR and then of knowledge management can thus be seen as attempts to assuage the uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding IT use (though at the same time increasing it to the benefit of consultants and others). By bundling IT applications within an overarching discourse, this current trend raises new questions about technological innovation. The influence of management discourse on the adoption and design of technology is relatively neglected in the literature on IT and organizations. The latter is still centred on a dichotomy of technological determinism versus social choice, which