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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