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.

-