Abstract
Knowledge Artifact (KA) is an analytical construct by which analysts, researchers and designers from different disciplines usually denote those material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use, sharing and representation of knowledge. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing literature by providing a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the heterogeneous contributions on this concept in the specialist literature. From our survey of the main contributions to the definition of this concept, we outline a spectrum of stances laying between two theoretical extremes: we denote one pole “representational”, as it is grounded on the idea that knowledge can be an “object per se”; and the other pole “socially situated”, as it builds on the viewpoint seeing knowledge as a social practice, that is an epiphenomenon of a situated, context-dependent and performative interaction of human actors through and with “objects of knowing”. In proposing a unifying model to gather complementary dimensions of knowledge together, our aim is to shed light on the multiple ways these ideas can inform the “reification” of knowledge into particular IT artifacts, which we call IT Knowledge Artifact (ITKA), and on how seemingly irreconcilable positions can contribute in the design of these computational artifact supporting knowledge work in organizations.