Knowledge Management Systems, Social Media, & Organizational Learning

So I have finally come to the last blog post regarding our reading list! I have to admit at the beginning of the semester I was worried that I wouldn’t be disciplined enough to keep up with the class, but I made it! As for this blog, I still have to post about the folksonomy so I will probably do that next week. Also, I still plan on using this blog for posting about school and other library related tasks, so feel free to check back from time to time after we complete this class. 

So for my final readings I read Alavi and Leidner’s article, Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: conceptual foundations and research issues. Then I read Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age by Hemsley and Mason. Finally, I read the Huber article about Organizational learning. 

The first article by Alavi and Leidner discusses how many of the knowledge management processes (classification, etc.) have been around for most of history and how only in recent years have researchers really begun considering knowledge as an important tool for organizations. Alavi and Leidner go on to discuss how knowledge management systems are developed and implemented by examining important research issues in the field. This was relatively straightforward stuff, but it was pretty interesting overall given what I have already read this semester. 

The next article I read was one that many of you have already covered in your blogs, the Hemsley and Mason article. This article reminded me of the Nahapiet and Ghoshal article that I read last week. Mainly because Hemsley and Mason seemed to agree that social media facilitates knowledge creation, which is not a far cry from what Nahapiet & Ghoshal said, which was that social capital helps create intellectual capital. One of the neat things about this article is that the authors put forth the idea of a “knowledge ecosystem,” which the authors propose is the result of the collaboration and innovation that come from social media tools like blogs, wikis, and microblogging. Another interesting part of this article is how they begin, which is by dissecting how something “goes viral” and the outcome of such an event. As a fan of Twitter and YouTube, I really enjoyed this article and it would probably rank high on my list of favorite KM readings this semester. 

The final article I read was by Huber and it discusses organizational learning through a review of related literature. From this, Huber finds that organizational learning, like Blackler found about knowledge, is too broad to be assessed normally. Therefore, Huber broke organizational learning down into four categories: knowledge acquisition, information interpretation, organizational memory (which Anne discusses on her blog here, and information distribution. Interestingly enough, one of the things that Huber found in this article was that among scholars who research organizational learning, there is very little “cumulative work.” Huber hypothesizes that this is because researchers have difficulty finding one another and that even when they do, few agree with one another. Of course, this article was written in 1991, so it is much easier for researchers to find one another today, thanks to technology!  

 Sources

Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. E. (2001). Review: Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: Conceptual foundations and research issues. MIS quarterly, 107-136.

Hemsley, J., & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23(1-2), 138-167.

Huber, G. P. (1991). Organizational learning: The contributing processes and the literatures. Organization science, 2(1), 88-115.

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.