OFFICE EQUIPMENT SERVICE ENGINEERS AND CONSULTANTS AS KNOWLEDGE WORKERS DONALD HISLOP
Introduction Hislop (2008) reconceptualised Frenkel et al.’s knowledge work framework to make it compatible with the ‘all work is knowledge work’ perspective. The utility of the revised framework was illustrated by using it to describe and understand the skills and knowledge involved in two different jobs: management consultants and office equipment service engineers.1 Data on the engineers was collected via conducting interviews in three small office equipment servicing companies based in the same city in the English Midlands, while data on the consultants was collected via conducting interviews in two small HRM-focused management consultancies, from the north-west and south-west of England. Both these groups of workers were classified as knowledge workers, with the skills, knowledge and level of creativity involved in their work being summarised in Table 1. Office Equipment Service Engineers The day-to-day work of the engineers involved visiting customers within a particular geographic area to repair, service and install office equipment such as copiers, fax machines, printers and scanners.

The number of clients visited per day typically varied from between two to seven dependent upon the complexity of particular jobs. For the service engineers, the level of creativity typically involved in their work was relatively low. This was because the majority of the jobs they did were relatively repetitive and required little diagnostic analysis, with most repair and service work involving dealing with similar types of repairs and tasks. In terms of the skill dimension of the framework, there was a reasonable need to make use of all three skill types. First, actionbased skills were needed as most jobs involved some amount of physically disassembling and reassembling equipment. Thus one engineer compared such work to carrying out a routine service on a car. Social skills were also necessary to allow effective communication not only with clients, but also with colleagues. The individualised nature of their work, which involved travelling to clients and working alone, required much of this communication work to be done by mobile phone. The apparent simplicity of most jobs undertaken by the engineers was a little deceptive as it disguised the extent to which intellective skills were used. This was

largely because these skills were relatively tacit, having been developed through experience. This process was summed up by one engineer as follows: You do the training course and they show you how the machine works: you take it apart. But when you get to that machine [on a job] it is when you start learning and obviously the first time you have a fault it might take you a couple of hours to figure out what it is and then the next time you go, because you have had it before, you are straight in and sort it. In terms of knowledge, the engineers made little if any use of theoretical knowledge, but their work did involve developing and utilising contextual knowledge. This consisted of an understanding, developed over time, of what the business needs of their client’s office equipment were (the engineers covered specific geographic areas and over time visited the same clients many times), and how this impacted on the type of problems that typically developed. One engineer described this as follows, You get to know what they expect from the machine, which might be quite different from what someone else with an identical machine expects.

Thus, the way their clients used their office equipment affected the type of faults that their equipment developed, and having an understanding of this constituted contextual knowledge for the engineers. They drew on this knowledge and combined it with the action-based and intellective skills they possessed in diagnosing and repairing these faults and carrying out their work. Management Consultants In contrast to the engineers, the work of the consultants involved a high level of creativity. The consultancy firms that were examined provided HRM-related advice to clients, primarily in the area of recruitment and selection. In the consultant interviews, one of the features of their work that provided the most job satisfaction was the level of variety involved in their work. For the consultants, no two clients’ needs and requirements were ever the same, thus every project the consultants worked on was different and involved developing a particular solution to the specific needs of each client. In the skill dimension of the framework, while the consultants had negligible need to develop and use action-based skills, their work involved the frequent use of both social and intellective skills. As with the engineers, there were two features of their work which required them to use social skills, first in dealing with clients and second in dealing with colleagues. The consultants needed to spend a significant amount of their time interacting with clients, face to face, by phone and email, as they needed to first work out what their requirements were, and then once they had developed a proposed solution they had to present it to their client, and if they were happy with this, they would help implement their solution.

As with the engineers, the consultants spent much of their working day away from colleagues, thus colleague-facing communication was mainly conducted by phone and email. In understanding the nature of their intellective skills and how the consultants drew on them in their work it is useful to link them to the knowledge involved in their work. This is because all three were used simultaneously by the consultants in the key task their work involved: designing solutions to meet the specific needs of their various clients. The work of the consultants involved the use of both theoretical and contextual knowledge. The need for theoretical knowledge and the intellectual character of the consultants’ work can be seen in the fact that all the consultants are educated to at least degree level, with most having postgraduate qualifications. The contextual knowledge developed and used by the consultants related to the needs and requirements of their clients. Each client was different, and typically had diverse needs, thus with each project that the consultants worked on they had to develop their contextual knowledge of their client, largely through speaking to them and reading relevant documentation.

The need for intellective skills in the work of the consultants involved bringing together their theoretical knowledge with the contextual knowledge they had developed of their client’s needs to design bespoke solutions for each client. Thus intellective skills were required in synthesising these two types of knowledge. This practical application of theoretical knowledge was another feature of their work they typically found rewarding. This process of using intellective skills to apply theory to particular situations was described by one consultant as follows: I believe abstract theories are all very well but actually really what you want is something that applies. It’s good to actually put into practice theory and hopefully make a difference to some people. Conclusion From the perspective of the mainstream, professionally focused definition of knowledge work outlined earlier, only the management consultants would be labelled as knowledge workers. However, by taking account of both the contextual knowledge and intellective skills involved in the work of the engineers those adopting the ‘all work is knowledge work’ perspective consider it legitimate to label the work of both groups as constituting knowledge work.
Questions
1 Do you agree with the analysis that is presented, that because of the requirement of the service engineers to utilise contextual knowledge that they can be classified as knowledge workers?
2 If a knowledge worker is defined as anyone whose work involves the use of a reasonable amount of theoretical or contextual knowledge can you think of any occupations that it isn’t appropriate to label knowledge work?