How do Knowledge and Innovation Work within Organizations: The Situationist View of the Firm (SVF).

This paper proposes a different idea of knowledge management (KM) and an alternative path to understand innovation processes within the organizations. We compared two paradigms of the firm. On one hand, the Uni ̄ed Approach, widely dominant in management studies, reifies the firm and interprets it as a collective entity, a pre-determined system with respect to the actors. On the other hand, the Situationist View defines the firm as a concrete system built by the actors and qualifies it as a space of games, interactions, negotiations and conflicts among actors and their coalitions. Our purpose is to contribute to enrich the scientific debate on innovation management through different concepts power, coalitional dynamics and institutional pressures until now in shadow, if not absent at all.