When the General Meets the Particular: The Practices and Challenges of Interorganizational Knowledge Reuse

A large literature addresses the practices and challenges surrounding knowledge reuse within organizations. Yet organizations frequently attempt to reuse knowledge from outside their boundaries, which may be even more challenging. The practice is so prevalent that an entire industry—the consulting industry—has developed to support it. Unfortunately, we understand little about how knowledge embedded in one organization is used to intervene in another and about what challenges follow from the attempt to do so. In this paper, we aim to address these questions. On the basis of an analysis of four months of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival data surrounding an engagement between a leading consulting firm and a multihospital healthcare system, we find that partners and senior executives created generalizations based on their experience and encouraged junior consultants and hospital employees to apply these generalizations and reuse old solutions. Yet junior consultants, who had different backgrounds and were embedded in particular contexts, struggled to reuse solutions, and they instead developed novel insights through the engagement. We argue, moreover, that the ultimate success of consulting engagements lies in this division of labor within and across firms. Our work contributes to the literatures on knowledge reuse, organizational learning, and consulting by illuminating how knowledge is (or is not) reused and how differences between junior and senior consultants, and between consultants and clients, shape both the reuse of existing solutions and the development of new ones.