Page - (000043) - in Knowledge and Networks

33 organizations, academic institutions) with appropriate networks of solvers who are people, not fi rms, to collaborate in remunerative, problem-solving activity. Based on information drawn from numerous cases studies, I develop a normative argument about the social as well as economic potential of this organizational approach to innovation that I term mediated crowdsourced project work . At this critical juncture in the global economy I am interested in how new approaches to accessing expertise in open networks, notably crowdsourcing, might be constructed so as to erode pre- carious conditions of work while serving to dissolve frictions of difference among people who might otherwise not interact in an increasingly segregated world. Mediated crowdsourced project work is germane for two main reasons. First, the effort and ability of fi rms to reach innovative freelancers disassociated from fi rms and even unemployed conceivably can avoid institutionalized discrimination at the outset because actors in crowdsourced activity are recruited on the basis of their expertise relative to specifi ed problems, not their work associations, previous his- tory, or formal education. If we accept that many people earning below a living wage have well-developed skills, even if informally developed, then this system in principle has the potential to be inclusive, although to date, inclusivity has not been a goal and indeed has not been served. Second, the immateriality of collaboration in knowledge networks associated with project work (as opposed to selling intellectual property) brings people into contact with one another on the basis of their expertise. If innovative communities of practice 11 that are tapped for expertise were to open to diverse actors, then people who might otherwise not interact beyond superfi cial exchanges could gain trust and mutual respect through working together in mean- ingful interaction aimed at effective problem solving. The idea of people developing mutual respect and trust in the process of using complementary expertise to solve problems for fi rms suggests that people learn about each other and develop social knowledges in the process of work with eco- nomic, material objectives. This is key, although the content of social knowledges typically is absent from analysis of economic networks in light of the conventional instrumentality of the social for the economic. I suggest extending types of knowledges in economic-oriented literatures to include social knowledges, which I defi ne as the generation of knowledges about actors’ lives and circumstances, talents, idiosyncrasies, tragedies, and humor. Existing typologies of economic knowledges are rooted in Karl Polanyi’s ( 1958 , 1966 ) distinction between tacit and coded knowledges. Frank Blackler’s ( 1995 ) elaborated typology includes embrained knowledge (rooted in an individual’s cog- nitive abilities); embodied knowledge (practical knowledge developed in specifi c physical contexts, as in project work); encultured knowledge (rooted in shared 11 The term “communities of practice,” CoPs (Amin & Cohendet, 2004 ; Amin & Roberts, 2008 ; Lave & Wenger, 1991 ; Wenger, 1998 ; Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002 ), refers to context- specifi c practices that foster innovativeness among entrepreneurs through collaboration. An inde- pendent but parallel concept is “ba,” which translates from Japanese as “place,” in reference to public arenas in which innovative knowledges are generated and exchanged (Nonaka, 1994 ; Nonaka & Konno, 1998 ). Both concepts emerged with a localized context in mind, but evolved to consider collaborative practices across space. 2 Reversing the Instrumentality of the Social for the Economic