“Made with knowledge”: Reporting a qualitative literature review on the concept of the it knowledge artifact

Knowledge Artifact (KA) is an analytical construct denoting 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 scholar contributions proposed on this concept so far. After a comprehensive literature review we define one pole as “representational”, grounded on the idea that knowledge can be an “object per se”; and another pole as “socially situated”, where knowledge is seen as a social practice, that is a situated, context-dependent and performative interaction of human actors through and with “objects of knowing”. We propose a unifying view of the dimensions of knowledge, and, in so doing, we try to shed light on the multiple ways these can inform the “reification” of knowledge into specific IT artifacts, which we call IT Knowledge Artifact (ITKA). Our model can contribute to the design of computational artifacts supporting knowledge work in organizations.