Theorizing Knowledge in
Organizations
In
order to better understand the notion of “managing” knowledge, there is a need
to better understand what it is about knowledge flow in organizations that
lends itself to any form of management. The literature has discussed
organizational knowledge both as a resource [Grant, R., 1996] and a process of
learning [Argyris and Schon, 1978, Senge, P., 1990], often emphasizing one
aspect over the other. In the resource view, knowledge is conceptualized as an
object that exists largely in formal documents or online artifacts amenable to
organizing and manipulation.
The
process view, on the other hand, largely emphasizes the emergent nature of
knowledge that is often embedded within a person or within organizational
routines, activities, and outcomes, or arises from the interplay of persons and
existing information or knowledge. the scope for the “management” of knowledge,
it is still worth exploring the issues and debate surrounding the practice of
creating, gathering, and sharing knowledge within organizations.
3.1 KNOWLEDGE AS RESOURCE AND PROCESS
Through
the resource perspective, organizations view knowledge as a fundamental
resource in addition to the traditional resources of land, labor, and capital.
Whether as a resource or as a process, for organizations that have begun to
recognize organizational knowledge as a source of competitive advantage,
knowledge generation and retention have become strategic necessities for such
knowledge dependent firms.
It
is held that the knowledge that the firm possesses is a source of sustainable
competitive advantage, and is, accordingly, regarded as a strategic resource of
the firm in need of management attention. On the other hand, through the
process view, organizations are thought of as information processing and
knowledge generating systems [Grant, R., 1996].
Baumard,
P. [1999] proposes looking at knowledge in organizations along two dimensions:
tacit-explicit versus individual-collective. He defines four quadrants in which
knowledge types are situated: tacit individual (intuitiveness),
tacit-collective (social practice), explicit-individual (expertise), and,
explicit collective (rules). Grounding the use of the quadrants in observations
of exemplar case-study organizations, Baumard suggests that the creation of
organizational knowledge can be tracked by locating actors’ responses (knowing)
within the appropriate quadrants of the matrix.
3.2 INTERACTIONS FORKNOWLEDGE CREATION
While
knowledge itself may be perceived as a resource, its creation occurs through
human interactions, whether physical or virtual. For example, for knowledge to
emerge from within a group, interactions that occur among its members shape the
knowledge that emerges from the mutual engagement and participation of the
group members. Those with a communication and interaction perspective have
argued that through discourse and dialectics, individuals shape and re-shape
the thought processes of others, eventually leading to a situation of
negotiated ormutually co-constructed reasoning for action and knowledge [von
Krogh et al.,1998]
Nonaka
and Takeuchi are the most prominent theorists in the knowledge management
domain. Their SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination,
Internalization) model posits a spiral-type process in which knowledge goes
from within a person’s own knowledge store to a more explicit state that can be
shared socially with others. If viewed through these ebbs and flows of thought,
that is, socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization,
knowledge creation takes on a very dynamic character, always changing, always
synthesizing.
3.3 ACTIVITY AS CONTEXT
Building
on Engeström, Y. [1999] general model of socially distributed activity systems,
Blackler, F. [1995] proposes that knowledge can be observed as emerging out of
the tensions that arise within an organization’s activity systems, that is,
among individuals and their communities, their environment (rules and
regulations), and the instruments and resources that mediate their activities.
Through immersion in joint activity, individuals in organizations gain tacit
knowledge, the sharing of which occurs as a result of the mutual participation
[Tsoukas, H., 1996].
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