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The purpose of this paper is to engage knowledge management (KM) researchers and practitioners with Foucault’s power/knowledge lens as a way of thinking about and recognising the central role of power in organisational knowledge cultures.

The empirical illustrations in this paper are drawn from two qualitative studies in different professional and institutional contexts (insurance and theatre work). Both studies used in-depth interviews and discourse analysis as their principal methods of data collection and analysis.

The empirical examples illustrate how practitioners operate within complex power/knowledge relations that shape their practices of knowledge sharing, generation and use. The findings show how an application of the power/knowledge lens renders visible both the constraining and productive force of power in KM.

Researchers may apply the conceptual tools presented here in a wider variety of institutional and professional contexts to examine the complex and multifaceted role of power in a more in-depth way.

KM professionals will benefit from an understanding of organisational power/knowledge relations when seeking to promote transformational changes in their organisations and build acceptance for KM initiatives.

This paper addresses a gap in the literature around theoretical and empirical discussions of power as well as offering an alternative to prevailing resource-based views of power in KM.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how students construct narratives of themselves as information seekers in a school context where their descriptions of their information activities are assessed and graded.

Blog posts on credibility judgements written by 28 students at a Swedish upper secondary school were analysed through a bottom-up coding process based in the sociocultural concept of narratives of selves.

Two tensions in the students’ accounts are identified. The first tension is that between the description of the individual, independent student and the description of the good group member. The second tension is between describing oneself as an independent information seeker and at the same time as someone who seeks information in ways that are sanctioned within the school setting.

The study focuses on a specific social practice and on situated activities, but also illustrates some aspects of information activities that pertain to educational contexts in general. It explores how social norms related to credibility judgements are expressed and negotiated in discursive interaction.

The study highlights that when information activities become objects of assessment, careful consideration of what aspects are meant to be assessed is necessary.

The study is based on the idea of information activities as socially and discursively shaped, and it illustrates some of the consequences when information activities become objects of teaching, learning, and grading.

The purpose of this paper is to address the role of cognitive skills and extent of skill use at work in explaining the immigrant–native wage gap in Europe. The study targets immigrant–native disparities in literacy and numeracy cognitive skills, as important, yet not exhaustive factor behind immigrants’ wage penalty.

The research relies on the Program of International Assessment of Adult Competencies data for 15 European countries. The empirical analysis employs multivariate regression analysis and incorporates the full set of plausible values for each skill domain, to correctly measure cognitive skills. To estimate standard errors, the authors employ Jackknife replication methodology with 80 replication weights and final population weight.

The authors document that, on average, immigrants achieve substantially worse scores in literacy and numeracy test domains. Only highly educated immigrants tend to improve their skills over time in host countries. The results of wage gap analysis indicate that having cognitive skills, demographic profile and occupation category comparable to natives does not yield comparable wage rate. The remaining wage gap results from the systematic differences in skills application at work, as immigrants use their skills to lower extent, relative to natives.

The research employs a novel measure of productive human capital, which accounts for cognitive skills in literacy and numeracy domains, and frequencies of skill use at work. It allows to more precisely evaluate the immigrant–native disparity in human capital application and its reflection on the wage rate.