The creation of knowledge is an aspect of Work-integrated Learning (WIL) not really explored by scholarship. With the aim of examining the process of knowledge creation at a government agency this thesis establishes a link between the fields of WIL and organizational knowledge creation. To this end, the evaluation of the County Administrative Board’s (CAB) of Västra Götaland crisis management of the covid-19 pandemic is used as a case study.

I use autoethnography as a method to describe and analyse my personal experience of being a participant observer of knowledge creation while working in the team tasked with conducting the evaluation. The empirical data consist of fieldnotes and e-mail correspondence. Following the grounded theory methodology of simultaneously collecting, coding and analysing the data is seen as the first step in a two-step analysis with the second step being the application of the concept of ba together with the SECI model from organizational knowledge creation theory as an analytical framework to guide my observations and make sense of my personal experience.

The analysis shows that knowledge creation related to the evaluation was a collective activity on different levels and that the process of creating knowledge was affected by other processes occurring inside and outside of CAB. The work on the evaluation was approached pragmatically by doing what needed to be done to create the most useful knowledge. The pragmatic approach also manifested itself in dealing with workplace politics – factors related to self-interest and/or adherence to hierarchy that influenced the knowledge creation process. In terms of ba and the SECI model, the analysis shows that the knowledge creation process took place in two bas – dialoguing ba and systemising ba – which occurred simultaneously and were engaged continuously as the process moved forwards.