Knowledge, Social Capital, & Information Society

This week continues my quest to assemble the most random assortment of articles together in a blog post. For this posting, I start with Blackler’s article, Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: an overview and interpretation. Followed closely by Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s article, Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. I finish it off with Rule and Besen’s article, The once and future information society. 

In the first article I read, Blackler brings up the age old question that vexes all information professionals: What is knowledge? He goes through the various definitions that other researchers use, but in the end Blackler concludes that most are too confining to actually define knowledge. In the second portion of the article, Blackler discusses how it is more accurate to refer to knowledge as “knowing,” and that researchers should focus on the systems people learn from, so that it can be replicated for future knowledge creation. It seems to be a recurring theme in many of my classes that professors pose the “What is knowledge?” question for various discussions, and it was definitely one that I struggled with so I really liked what Blackler said about knowledge being difficult to define and I would agree that “knowing” is a more accurate phrasing of the term. 

The next article I read was Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s article in which they propose that social capital helps create intellectual capital. Basically what I believe they’re saying here is that if there is a good, informal environment in an organization where employees can interact, then the social capital they develop will eventually spillover into intellectual capital. For instance, sharing tips about how to do a task more efficiently, etc. Which makes sense then, when later on Nahapiet & Ghoshal argue that organizations are better at developing this setting, precisely because of their size it gives them more opportunities to develop those settings. 

The final article I read this week was by Rule and Besen. Their article was basically a survey of information society models and it was long and meandering and definitely not my favorite article this semester. When I read the abstract and saw the Enlightenment period mentioned, I figured I’d love this article. However, not so. Maybe I just read this article wrong, but from what I gather Rule & Besen basically decided to take it upon themselves to prove that KM is basically BS. Basically they claim that because there is no empirical evidence for many of the KM theories, that they are just fads associated with the current times, whether they be in the Enlightenment period or the present day. While I agree that there are a lack of empirical studies in the KM field, it is also an extremely young field. Moreover, the field is ever evolving based on the formats used and with the explosion of technology in the past twenty years, it has been undeniably difficult for KM scholars to undertake such studies when the communication/information formats that people use are constantly evolving.

Did anyone else get this feel about the Rule & Besen article, or was it just me?

 

Sources

Blackler, F. (1995). Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: an overview and interpretation. Organization studies, 16(6), 1021-1046.

Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of management review, 23(2), 242-266.

Rule, J. B., & Besen, Y. (2008). The once and future information society. Theory and society, 37(4), 317-342.

Nonaka, Knowledge Economy, & Informational Cities.

So this week I finally read one of the oft cited articles in knowledge management literature, I am of course speaking about the Nonaka article, A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. A week or so ago, Anne and I discussed in the comments section our reading list order. I believe she had the right idea to move Nonaka up towards the topof the list, me on the other hand, I took the dart throwing method when it came to picking articles to read this semester! 

In addition to Nonaka, I also read the Powell and Snellman article, The knowledge economy and the Stock article, Informational cities: Analysis and construction of cities in the knowledge society.

As I mentioned earlier, Nonaka’s article is often cited and considered very important in the field of KM literature. This is because Nonaka is one of the first to sort of parlay what Polanyi calls tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge into something that is applicable for businesses. Not only that, but he develops a model for it as well. Nonaka proposed that the “continuous interaction” between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge enables organizations to create knowledge about their own “patterns of interaction” which allows them to “take account of ambiguity, redundancy, noise, or randomness generated.”(p. 18). Thus the creation of the field of knowledge management! Although, it probably existed in some form prior to this, people just didn’t know what to call it! But to me, knowledge management has always sounded somewhat similar to quality assurance or auditing.

The next article I read was the Powell and Snellman article, I’m not even going to lie, this article drove me nuts. It was one of those I had to read several times in a row to feel like I had a grasp of what they were trying to say. And I know that I don’t fully agree with their article. Apparently I’m not the only one, because Darra had thisexcellent blog post about the Powell and Snellman article back in March. Like Darra, I agree that it is overly simplistic to assume that an increase in the number of patents equates with “knowledge production.” Although, they do point out in their conclusion that the challenge all km researchers face is “to connect the abundant qualitative indicators with qualitative studies of substantive changes in organizational practices and their outcomes (p. 216).” 

My final article for this week, was the Stock article about Informational cities. In this article the authors view cities as booming centers of information, from digital libraries to technical training of employees. This article was neat because they took urban demographics and looked at them from an information science perspective to determine why some cities are successful information centers and others are not. They found that cities with more cultural diversity are more innovative, and that “four types of enterprise dominate the informational city: financial service providers, knowledge-intensive high-tech industry sectors, companies of the information economy, and further creative and knowledge-intensive service companies (p. 981).” They also found that all four of those types of enterprise are “absolutely reliant on ICT and cognitive infrastructures (p. 981).” This echoes what Goggins and Mascaro discussed in the article I blogged about last week. Or rather, they echo Stock, since their article came after his. For a quick recap, Goggins and Mascaro found that “technology and computing have an affect beyond those organizations in the social setting.” This is definitely something that needs to be researched further, but I did found the direction that Stock and Goggins and Mascaro are going very intriguing because of the implications it could have for knowledge management and ICT. 

Sources

Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization science, 5(1), 14-37.

Powell, W. W., & Snellman, K. (2004). The knowledge economy. Annual review of sociology, 199-220.

Stock, W. G. (2011). Informational cities: Analysis and construction of cities in the knowledge society. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(5), 963-986.

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I See Knowledge Management in ICT

Happy Tuesday everyone!

While I know that we still have to do a peer review of each others proposals/grants and our own revisions, I am so glad to be done with that paper. What about y'all?

As for this week's readings I read my final (!) research article, which was written by Goggins and Mascaro. In the review category I read an article on organizational knowledge by Tsoukas and Vladimirou and an article on epistemology (boo-hiss!) by Cook and Brown.

This first article, Context Matters: The Experience of Physical, Informational, and Cultural Distance in a Rural IT Firm by Goggins and Mascaro was pretty dry there is no way of getting around that. Dry, but informative. This article is about Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and if it sounds familiar, that's because it is. UK announced (http://ict.uky.edu/) a few weeks ago the approval for a new degree in ICT. According to the site, the ICT program "focuses on the intersection of technology, people who use that technology, policies and regulations that govern the use of that technology and communities or environments in which that technology is used." So with that basic understanding of ICT, Goggins and Mascaro focused on how ICT is shaped/affected by distance, more specifically physical distance, cultural distance, and informational distance by studying an IT firm in a rural area. What the authors conclude in this study is that while we are in the age of technology and many computing-related studies are focused primarily on the "organizational impacts of computing (p. 125)," technology and computing have an affect beyond those organizations in the social setting.

 The next article I read was Bridging Epistemologies by Cook and Brown. If you're unfamiliar with why epistemology is so unpopular, take a look at the Google definition: "the theory of knowledge, esp. with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion (n.d.)." Sounds like fun, right? Anyhow, this article focuses on how groups or individual practice results in "knowing," and from here Cook and Brown discuss different types of knowledge such as explicit, tacit (remember Polanyi, anyone?), as well as how there is a sort of tango (they use generative dance, but I prefer tango) between knowledge and knowing. As Melinda points out in her blog, this is a rehash of one of our first discussions about what exactly the difference is between information, data, and knowledge in school. 

The final article I read for this week was What is Organizational Knowledge by Tsoukas and Vladimirou. This article also brought up our good friend Polanyi in an effort to better explain and understand organizational knowledge, how it develops, and how it can be managed. In their conclusion, Tsoukas and Vladimirou found that knowledge developed by the workers is very dependent upon many different aspects (work experience, education, etc.) and is nearly impossible to manage. So perhaps management should perhaps take a more laissez-faire approach with employees if the situation is positive and try and study what exactly it is the employees know in order to make a more formal framework. 

We're almost done, you guys - just 5 weeks to go!

References 

Cook, S. D., & Brown, J. S. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization science, 10(4), 381-400.

Goggins, S. P., & Mascaro, C. (2013). Context matters: The experience of physical, informational, and cultural distance in a rural IT firm. The Information Society, 29(2), 113-127. 

Tsoukas, H., & Vladimirou, E. (2001). What is organizational knowledge?. Journal of management studies, 38(7), 973-993. 

Knowledge Management Topics: Trust, Reputation, Information Sharing, & Knowledge Outsourcing

 Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Who wouldn't trust this kitteh?

Even though it's Spring Break, knowledge management waits for no person! I don't know about y'all, but I've been getting bombarded with e-mails about the UK payroll issues. If you haven't been getting the e-mails, the Cliffnotes version is this: On payday two weeks ago, UK states that there was an unfortunate error by their banking partner, PNC which led to many employees not receiving their paycheck on time. This led to me think about how it relates to what we've talked about with knowledge sharing and bounded awareness in knowledge management. So this week I picked articles related to trust and reputation in knowledge management. 

 

Knowledge Management comic strip from here.

The first article I read was Information sharing and trust during major incidents: Findings from the oil industry by Ibrahim and Allen. In light of incidents such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I found this article to be very relevant.  Remember the Hansen, Nohria, & Tierney's article that talked about how consulting companies save and recycle knowledge to be reused by the employees for the benefit of the company's bottom line? The bottom line in this article is about information sharing, albeit in the oil industry and not consulting companies. The fascinating thing about this article is that you would think that trust is something super important before employees feel free to share information. However, Ibrahim and Allen show that sharing information actually builds trust. Which I guess makes sense, as Melinda put it (here) that sharing information is sort of a gesture of 'good faith.' However, the cynic in me also thinks that maybe some people are fond of information sharing because it spreads the guilt around if something happens. Sort of like: "Here, now you all have the same information. If it blows up, it wasn't just me who knew and didn't say anything." Although, personally, I prefer Melinda's way of thinking, maybe it is a little bit of both?

The next article I read was Knowledge outsourcing: an alternative strategy for knowledge management by Lam and Chua. This was a case study about knowledge outsourcing and how it is currently used by an organization, in the hopes of presenting it as an alternative to knowledge management. On a knee jerk reaction, I think this is nuts. If you are going to outsource knowledge for your company, then why not just hire the people that already have the knowledge. However, after I thought about it, it does make sense in certain instances. For example, if it is a small company that does not have many technological needs, then outsourcing that help to a dedicated external tech help company would make sense.  The article presents some interesting points and while I'm open to the idea, I am still not sold that knowledge outsourcing (KO) is a viable alternative to knowledge management. The way I look at it is that in the long run, knowledge management will help a company run smoother. It's like the old adage: "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for life!"

The final article I read for this week was The impact of trust and reputation on the transfer of best practices by Lucas. This article did a complete 180 from the Ibrahim and Allen article, by saying that trust is necessary for the "transfer of best practices." Although, I think there is an important distinction between the "transfer of best practices" and "information sharing." To me, information sharing is more general in nature, whereas transfer of best practices means that over time the best of that information sharing has evolved into sound practices and is perhaps useful on a wide scale in the company.  So what Lucas is saying then is that to get these best practices, you need trust and a good reputation (Sorry Joan Jett). Which of course make complete sense and is probably why innovation driven companies like Google work so hard to cultivate trust and create positive working environments for their employees.

 

Dilbert comic strip from here.

References 

Hassan Ibrahim, N., & Allen, D. (2012). Information sharing and trust during major incidents: Findings from the oil industry. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(10), 1916-1928.

Lam, W., & Chua, A. Y. (2009). Knowledge outsourcing: an alternative strategy for knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(3), 28-43. 

Lucas, L. M. (2005). The impact of trust and reputation on the transfer of best practices. Journal of Knowledge Management, 9(4), 87-101.