(How) does knowledge flow? : a critical analysis of intra-organizational knowledge transfer

In this chapter, we argue that the discourse of knowledge transfer in organizational studies fails to record in the manner in which this transfer is implicated in the historical experiences of power differences and economic imbalances that undergrid the international encounter. The chapter draws on an empirical study of several months conducted by the first author in India, an ethnographic examination of the work practices of the subsidiary of a large US-based multinational corporation (MNC), which we have named Chloron Corporation. This chapter is a story of our attempts to make sense of the sea of data collected during this endeavour, through analysis of a single episode of knowledge transfer. The rest of the chapter is organized in three sections. In the first, we critically survey the representations of knowledge transfer in organizational research. We then present empirical research conducted at Chloron, to highlight the complete disjuncture between the theoretical descriptions of knowledge transfer and the empirical realities of corporate experience. In the final section, we theoretically analyze the research vignette to arrive at a different approach to knowledge transfer than that of mainstream research.