John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid wrote an article entitled "Practice vs. Process: The Tension That Won't Go Away" in Knowledge Directions, the Journal of the Institute for Knowledge Management (Spring, 2000). 
   In it, they describe the phenomenon of the succession of management movements in the nineties that reflected an enduring tension that arises between how knowledge in organizations is generated in practice, but implemented through process.  They believe that new knowledge is best created in single communities of practice, but that formal organizational processes are generally needed to turn inventions into marketable innovations. 
    The succession of management movements in the nineties reflected an effort to maintain a productive balance between practice on the one hand, and process on the other. Here are some excerpts:

Why these changes?

      "This succession of business movements doesn't simply represent a success of mutually exclusive alternatives, like long and short skirts, broad and narrow lapels. Rather, the alternatives are at their core complementary. Together they address challenges that coexist within a company. The process movement offered an organizational focus that the quality movement, for all its qualities, lacked. And knowledge management, for its part, can be seen as something of a response to process engineering that supplemented by overcoming its organizational tunnel vision....
      "The surface shifts respond to substantial, complementary tensions embedded in the structure of organizations which arise around the creation, flow and implementation of knowledge. They are what we think of as the tensions that won't go away - tensions that management has to find ways not only to live with, but also to make productive...

Practice 

     "Communities of practice are groups of people whose interdependent practice binds them into a collective of shared knowledge and common identity. Within such tight knit groups, ideas move with little explicit attention to "transfer", and practice is coordinated without much formal direction. When people work this way, barriers and boundaries between people and what they do are often insubstantial or irrelevant since a collective endeavor holds them together. ...

     "Given the shared trust and understanding involved and the preference for informal rather than formal coordination, such groups generally bypass many issues of hierarchy.  None of this, of course, bestows blissful harmony on such groups. All accounts record important fights... The shared world view, however, does make clear to insiders (in a way it is not to outsiders) what is worth fighting about - and what is not....

Knowledge creation and wealth creation

    "Knowledge grows in tight knit groups.. Wealth... comes from growth, often quite explosive growth. Such growth will often pull these small communities apart or subject them to profound pressures... To create growth, you will want to pull this community apart, allowing people to develop particular facets of the community's insights. So instead of the group in which the software designers work as dexterously with hardware or the engineers intuitively understand the demands of marketing, firms develop quickly into distinct communities of designers, or engineers, or marketers, and so on. As soon as this happens, coordination, which is almost implicit in such groups, becomes an explicit headache. Boundaries, almost invisible within communities, become a major source of concern between them....

Process

    "The challenge of coordinating diverse practice is usually best met by establishing business processes... They are the mechanisms whereby different communities of practice work not at random or serendipitously, but in a coordinated fashion. Process puts useful constraints on practice, providing the basic architecture which local changes in practice need to respect. It helps align different communities so that their separate practices, while possessed of enough autonomy to keep them vibrant, don't grow out of touch with one another. So process has to find the least amount of constraint necessary to enact the necessary amount of structure, to produce rigor without rigidity,  While a lot has been written about best practice, best process remains to be defined. We think of best processes as elegantly minimal."

Conflicting forces

   "Visually, we think of process as a vertical structure creating an organizational spine out of the myriad of practices that the organization comprises. Contrastingly, we see practice as horizontal. That is process emphasizes the hierarchical, explicit command-and-control side of organization - the structure that gets things done. Practice emphasizes the lateral connections within an organization, the implicit coordination and exploration that, for its part, produces things to do.  The two together, then, though they pull in different directions, are responsible for a firm's coordinated knowledge productions and growth. Practice without process tends to become unmanageable; process without practice becomes increasingly static. As orthogonal forces, these two inevitably do not resolve into a single force. Both have to be acknowledged."

From  John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid wrote an article entitled "Practice vs. Process: The Tension That Won't Go Away" in Knowledge Directions, the Journal of the Institute for Knowledge Management (Spring, 2000).