leading isues in knowledge management

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Leading Issues in Knowledge

Management

Edited by

Charles Despres

This extract consists of the contents

pages and the preface only. The book

can be purchased from:

http://www.academic-bookshop.com


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Leading Issues in Knowledge Management

Volume One.

Copyright The authors

First published April 2011 by

Academic Publishing International Ltd, Reading, UK

http://www.academic-publishing.org

[email protected]

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purposes of critical review, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored

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ISBN: 978-1-906638-87-0

Printed by Ridgeway Press in the UK.
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Contents

Introduction to Leading Issues in Knowledge ManagementResearch: ........ iiiThe Emergence and Diffusion of the Concept of Knowledge Work ............. 1

Hanna Timonen and Kaija-Stiina Paloheimo

Situated, Embodied Human Interaction and its Implications for Context

Building in Knowledge Mobilisation Design ................................................ 25Erkki Patokorpi

Comparison of Approaches toward Formalising Context: ImplementationCharacteristics and Capacities .................................................................... 45

William Loyola

Effects of Knowledge Representation on Knowledge Acquisition and

Problem Solving ......................................................................................... 67Mohamed Khalifa and Kathy Ning Shen

Does Intellectual Capital Management Make a Difference?

A Critical Case Study Application of Structuration Theory ......................... 80John Tull and John Dumay

A Hierarchical Modelling Approach to Intellectual Capital

Development ............................................................................................ 101

Eckhard Ammann

Folksonomies, Collaborative Filtering and e-Business: is Enterprise 2.0

One Step Forward and Two Steps Back? .................................................. 121Kevin Johnston

Virtual Communities of Practice: Investigating Motivations and

Constraints in the Processes of Knowledge Creation and Transfer .......... 136Ana Maria Ramalho Correia, Anabela Mesquita and Alice Paulos

Exploring Knowledge Processes in User-Centred Design ......................... 154Kaisa Still

The Impact of Stories ................................................................................ 175Joanna Sinclair


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Introduction to Leading Issuesin Knowledge Management

Research:

Knowledge Management, 2011

Comparatively few academics have the opportunity to be present at the

founding of an academic field and then accompany it through a certain

state of maturity. Yet this is probably the case for many of us who work in

or around Knowledge Management. It is mine, coming of age as I did in

1995 just when KM was stepping onto the steeper slope of its manage-

ment fashion wave. Infectious times for a young academic: it was obvi-

ous that the cognitive sciences, organization theory, symbolic action,

enlightened HR, managerial psychology were all on the cusp of knowl-

edge-intensive organizations and socio-economic systems. Consulting

houses were offering research contracts. The worlds first CKO was about

to be named. Tom Stewart was pollinating the corporate mind, companies

were buying, journals appearing and universities had KM doctoral pro-

grams on the drawing boards.

There is sometimes an aura around periods like this that somehow projects

order from underlying chaos, as characterizes an adolescents volition.Auras of this nature tend to dissolve. In an entertaining article that ap-

peared at this time De Long & Seemann (2000, p. 43) wrote, Knowledge

management is an inherently complex and confusing concept. A more

clairvoyant statement is seldom penned. A year earlier I had published a

study with my colleague Daniele Chauvel which, with an eye toward the

Sociology of Knowledge, was titled Knowledge Management(s), the plural

being designed to make a point (Despres & Chauvel, 1999). In this work we

applied a (then) state-of-the-art semantic algorithm to a textbase of KM

articles to understand what was being discussed, by whom, from which


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perspective, to what end, with what results, and arrived at the visual rep-

resentation in Figure 1:

Figure 1: A semantic map of Knowledge Management Discourse, 1999

After labouring to develop an orderly taxonomy from the various litera-

tures we wrote, Knowledge Management is clearly on the slippery slope of

being intuitively important but intellectually elusive, which was a clair-

voyant phrase in its own right. I believe the general frustration lay in the

obviousness of dealing directly with knowledge in the knowledge age

coupled to the difficulty of operationalizing the essential and surrounding

factors in an intellectually coherent way. Those concerned with realbusiness benefits were also frustrated as evidenced by this tract from

Wilson (2002):

Some techniques fail, or at least are dropped from the repertoire, be-

cause they are Utopian in character This was the case with business

process re-engineering, but businesses quickly realised that the costs of

carrying out BPR throughout the organization would be crippling in fact,

two thirds of BPR efforts are said to have failed (Hall, et al., 1994). Knowl-


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Charles Despres

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edge management (whatever it is) also shows signs of being offered as a

Utopian ideal and the results are likely to be similar.

Despite this and the underlying conceptual confusions (that were increas-ingly discussed by authors), KM was clearly surfing the fashion wave at the

turn of the Century as indicated by Wilsons own (2002) search for Knowl-

edge Management in article titles listed in the ISI Web of Science from

1981 to 2002 (Figure 2):

Figure 2: Numbers of articles with Knowledge Management in their title

as listed by the ISI Web of Science, 1981-2002 (from Wilson, 2002)

It is my view that the fashion wave crested around 2003-4 and things took

on a different hue - still progressive in the main but less euphoric and

dampened by the realization that a general theory of knowledge and its

management was not just elusive, but absurd. As an example Alvesson &

Karreman (2001) published the alluring title, Odd Couple: Making Sense of

the Curious Concept of Knowledge Management, which (along with others)

injected a critical perspective, reminded us of previous works and sug-

gested, caution is called for against the risk of recycling old ideas


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through relabeling key terms. (p. 1015). Indeed: the marketplace was then

aptly and mysteriously transmuted any given organizational process into a

knowledge processin the space of a billing cycle. The field was also clearly

divided with ICT-KM on one side and a potpourri of socio-economic think-ing on the other. An interesting paper by Subramani, Nerur & Mahapatra

(2003) identified 8 schools of thought at the intersection that KM had be-

come at this point, as displayed in this multidimensional scaling map in

Figure 3, and my reading of the field indicates that this is conservative:

Figure 3: A multidimensional scaling map of intellectual positions in

Knowledge Management, 1990-2002 (from Subramani, Nerur & Maha-

patra, 2003)

It was into this potpourri that I reached to present the following title to a

colloquium some 3 years ago: KM is a nice idea. Unfortunately, the field

hasnt met expectations. This unsympathetic pronouncement was the

product of frustrations and concerns I had with the academic rigor of the

field of Knowledge Management: in my view it was neither posing influen-

tial questions, nor inciting serious institutional change, but rather reacting

to events in patchwork fashion via an impressive / depressive collage of

intellectual traditions. I therefore launched a polemic:

due its lack of theoretical foundations and disciplinary mechanisms, thefield of Knowledge Management (KM) now qualifies as a multidiscipli-


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nary1

1It is perhaps useful to note that multidisciplinarityimplies the melding of multiple perspec-

tives focused on a problem / issue in the search of practical results, and is by definition ana-

thema to a discrete and reigning paradigm. Multidiscipliarityis not interdisciplinarity, thoughthe distinctions are primarily in terms of requisite (disciplinary) variety.

intersection of rather disparate interests, intellects and applications.

This is disappointing to the academics and practitioners who expected

more when the idea first surfaced some 25 years ago ... more in terms of

post-modern organizations and enlightened human interaction, more interms of knowledge economics, more in terms of knowledge-centric socie-

ties. More, in short, of a new field that would institutionalize convergence

so as to set new research agendas, define new problematics and identify

new practices for the new millennium.

KM has not distinguished itself from its tributary disciplines (20 or more),

all of which approach knowledge and management in their own pecu-

liar ways. There is no theory of economics, organization, systems or human

interaction specific to KM. There are no technologies, applications, prac-tices or prescriptions specific to KM. There are, however, abundant signs of

multi-disciplinarity: when convenient we find individuals, theories and

practices from various perspectives disembarking to discuss organizational

schemes and human interaction contingent on the wicked problem of

knowledge in the postmodern age

The thinking observer will conclude that the actor and his/her knowledge

have always been at the center of work, management and organization in

contemporary social science. That fundamental constructs began to

change in the mid-20th Century is clear; how they have been refined and

focused by KM is less clear. We are now some 40 years forward from Bells

clarion call (The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 1968), and 25 years out

from Zuboffs map of the intellectual landscape (In the Age of the Smart

Machine, 1984). The deeper currents of Modernity and Postmodernity

have underlain these and related works from the 1950s onward. From this

perspective the general observation is that KM surfaced in academic are-

nas circa 1990 as the offspring of endogenous developments in kindredareas (ICT, economics, sociology, organization theory, communication,

management ), and its twenty years of interdisciplinary discussion is little

more than a blip on the academic clock. Is it unreasonable to expect more

from a young and applied field of study?

Perhaps, but there are encouraging signs on the horizon.


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To begin with the obvious, the Sociology of Knowledge teaches that

changes in disciplinary frameworks occur over decades, if not centuries,

and the Kuhnian view is that transition periods are messy, confusing af-fairs. Given the fact that Karl Wiig first uttered the meme Knowledge Man-

agementin 1986 (Wiig, 1997), we should perhaps forgive the multidiscipli-

nary messiness and focus on the bigger picture: irreversible change is obvi-

ously underway (as usual) and despite its oxymoronic label KM is in a posi-

tion to sensemake and perhaps guide the transformations of increasing

scope and rapidity that grip life in the 21st

Century. After all, the Academy

institutionalized Managementas a science despite the considerable un-

dergrowth encountered along the way (Koontz, 1961; 1980).

Secondly, it is clear to me that technology continues to pull us forward.

The managerial and organizational sciences have scurried behind to make

sense of the forward thrust, as is perhaps proper in our areas of study. Just

as Knowledge Management followed inescapably from Information Man-

agement, and before that Data Management, and before that the circa-

1946 advent of the electronic computer, so are we today entering a 2.0 era

that is pregnant with both positive and dimly-perceived consequences. As I

write the worlds media agree that Tunisias popular revolt sparked Egypts

and Libyas popular revolts, that these events have set the Middle East

ablaze with popular aspirations, and that none of this would have occurred

absent Twitter, or Facebook, or Google. Who could have predicted this a

year ago?

Within our academic fields the Web 2.0 technologies are similarly hinting

at Enterprise 2.0 designs, where the fit with existing disciplinary founda-

tions in particular with organizational authority structures is achieved

only through intellectual gymnastics, if at all. Should the Cluetrain Mani-festo (1999) be right, a brave new world is being announced at this very

moment, opening vistas that may suit KM very well indeed. For evidence,

and as a popular sign of things to come, consider the trends announced in

Figure 42

2This data was obtained from Google Trends on 22 February 2011:

:

http://www.google.com/trends. According to Google, Google Trends analyzes a portion of

Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter,

relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graphwith the results our Search Volume Index graph.
http://www.google.com/trendshttp://www.google.com/trendshttp://www.google.com/trends


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Charles Despres

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Figure 4: Google Trendsaverage worldwide traffic 2004 2010: Knowledge

Management, Web 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0(unequal scales searches con-ducted independently)

hirdly, the consulting hype and silver bullet mantras that draped them-

selves over KM so conspicuously at the turn of the Century have faded

with the arrival of new management fashions (apparently a loose cloud

of internal / external networks (social, task, project, innovative) and im-

ages of an omni-connected future). This is a particular relief to me, from

this important perspective:

Emotionally charged and largely uncritical discourse

vaunting the quasi-magical potency of a management

technique characterizes the upswing of a fashion wave in its

popularity, and a more thoughtful and critical attitude to-

ward this technique characterizes the downswing ...

(Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999: 735)

Most actors agree that for 5 years or more KM has been on the downswing

of the management fashion wave and entering a new period (consider Fig-

ure 4 once again). Changes in the tone of practitioner publications are pal-


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pable (less euphoria, more deliberation, results-oriented). Changes in the

quality of academic publications are similarly unmistakable (more depth,

more co-authors, fewer gurus, improved methodologies). I am encouraged

that the field is increasingly conscious of itself a sign of impending wis-dom as evidenced by internal debates (e.g., Zhu, 2006; Swan, 2004), the

appearance of Sientometrics (e.g., Serenko, Bontis & Grant, 2009), co-

citation analyses (e.g., Subramani, M., Nerur, S.P., and Mahapatra 2002)

and critical reviews of its academic journals (e.g., Serenko & Bontis, 2009).

These developments point naturally toward the selections for this book.

My intent was to feature works that are on the cutting edge of the field,

that deepen the thinking in KM, and that do so in a scholarly, critical sort of

way. As an example of how this plays out: the impact, the import, thefoundational nature of context in any discussion of knowledge has been

cruelly lacking in this field and three papers in the book are devoted to

the subject. This is not to say that works discussing situated action, Struc-

turation or enactment are elsewhere absent; it simply reflects my consid-

ered opinion that their impact on the fields overall research agenda is

faint, and lacking. And so it is with the other selections each an important

statement in its own right, each hopefully a contribution to the ongoing

maturation of Knowledge Management.

Charles Despres

Research Professor

SKEMA Business School

Sophia Antipolis, France

March 2011

ReferencesAbrahamson, E. and Fairchild, G. Management Fashion: Lifecycles, Trig-

gers, and Collective Learning Processes.Administrative Science Quar-terly. 1999, 44(4): 708-740.

Alvesson, M. and Karreman, D. Odd Couple: Making Sense of the Curious

Concept of Knowledge Management.Journal of Management Studies,

2001. 38(7): 995-1018.

Davenport, E. Mundane Knowledge Management and Microlevel Organ-

izational Learning: An Ethological Approach.Journal of the American

Society for Information Science and Technology. 2002, 53(12): 1038

1046.


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Charles Despres

xi

De Long, D. & Seemann, P. Confronting Conceptual Confusion and Conflict

in Knowledge Management. Organizational Dynamics. 2000, 29(1):

3344.

Despres, C. & Chauvel, D. Knowledge Management(s).Journal of Knowl-edge Management, 1999, 3(2): 110-120.

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Subramani, M., Nerur, S.P., and Mahapatra, R. Examining the Intellectual

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citation Analysis. University of Minnesota Management Information

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York: Springer-Verlag. 271-296.

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