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.
