Concepts of Organizational Power and Intra-Organizational Coalitions Within The Scope of Knowledge Intensive Organizations

Knowledge is one of the main components of new economic structure that is called as knowledge era and it is one of the hot topics of social sciences. Knowledge intensive organizations, which have showed up naturally as a result of this era and which have been using knowledge both as an input and as an output, have revealed a different organizational structure than the past eras. Overcoming the uncertainties is the essence of organizational survival and it is one of the main issues emphasized in the organizational researches.This is also valid for the knowledge intensive organizations. According to ‘Strategic Contingency’ approach which is uttered by Hickson et al. (1971), the organizational units which play a critical role in overcoming uncertainties can use organizational power. Within the scope of knowledge intensive organizations, the individuals/groups/units that play critical and irreplaceable roles while overcoming uncertainties can be seen as power users. Moreover, these components of an organization which have heterogenic structure can live symbiotically and one of them can play the role of the dominant one in this coalition. In this paper, some theoretical propositions are tried to be inferred within the concepts mentioned above. The aim of the paper is to reveal theoretical assumptions concerning knowledge intensive organizations and to play a leading role for the studies on these issues