A fundamental necessity of social action is that it must occur within a context. While context is central to all explanations of social science, it has been examined most often in micro, discourse-related processes or situational semantics. Knowledge is inherently embedded in particular social situations (Birkinshaw, Nobel, and Ridderstrale 2002). The relationship between context and information seeking is a problem increasingly viewed as the central issue in information behavior research (Cool 2001; Dervin 1997, 2003; Johnson 2003; Pettigrew, Fidel, and Bruce 2001; Talja, Keso, and Pietilainen 1999; Taylor 1986).

Generally, the persistent theoretical problem of accounting for individual action in a social context is seldom explicitly addressed and we are unaware of the different senses of “context” in use (Dervin 1997). Especially lacking is the identification of “active” ingredients of the environment that trigger changes in KN (Johnson 2003).