Reading: What is organisational knowledge & knowing?

Knowledge is both resource and a source of value within employees in an organisation.

Crilly et al identify 9 ways of considering the title question, but one of the most interesting things for me is the idea of needing to ensure that organisations focus on being both learning and innovative bodies, and the idea that an organisation is greater than the sum of the individuals – where dispersal of knowledge can be both a benefit and a challenge – especially in a ‘knowledge instensive organisation’:

1.       Rules and processes

This is where individuals act within a context of ‘historically evolved collective understandings’ (Tsoukas & Vladimirou, 2001)(p.57) that are generalised into generic organisational rules.

2.       Justified belief

The imposition of knowledge by managers (Gourlay, 2006).

3.       Source of power and oppression

Critical theoretical views consider power relations where knowledge management can become a form of ‘behavioural control’ (p.58).  The dominant view (???) is that power is essentially a top down form of repression but has been criticised for not recognising that power may not be exercised (Clegg, 1989).

Foucault (1977) embeds power within the social body, where its ‘all-knowing, all-seeing’ presence creates self-regulation in employees as individuals guard their own normative behaviour.  ‘Calculability’ enables each to calculate behaviour deviance from the norm, with IT systems available to support this.  They can be ‘double edged’ acting both as constraints and empowering devices (Bloomfield & Coombs, 1992).

4.       Image and rhetoric

In ‘knowledge-intensive’ organisations link knowledge, work related to knowledge, employee management approaches and identity-regulation [presumably of both employees and the organisation].  These organisations are where “most work is said to be of an intellectual nature and where well-educated, qualified employees form the major part of the work force” and where rhetoric, image, interaction and identity are intense (Alveson, 2001).

5.       Dispersed and ambiguous

Becker (2001) suggests that dispersal of knowledge can complicate management decision making as they struggle to maintain an overview where knowledge is fragmented and people across the organisation learn at different rates.  Five strategies are suggested (and considered vital for successful virtual organisations):

a)      Create channels to access knowledge

b)      Give people licence to recognise and fill their own knowledge gaps

c)       Design institutional coordination mechanisms

d)      Distribute information in small chunks

e)      Reduce uncertainty by increasing availability of information

6.       Organisational competence

Different types of organisations value different things e.g. science-based consultancies value experimentation and accumulation of knowledge, whilst law-based consultants value interpretation (Scarborough, 2003) and develop different common languages.  Experience, methods/tools and cases create three parts of a knowledge system – with each leveraging the other along continua from general to specific knowledge and from tacit to articulate knowledge (Werr & Stjernberg, 2003 – diagram on p.61) – presumably to create success.

7.       Action & possibility

Hargadon & Fanelli (2002) describe an interdependence of empirical and latent perspectives on knowledge where employees use the action around them to generate individualised schemata of the organisation, where “every process of action is the production of something new, a fresh act, but at the same time all action exists in continuity with the past, which supplies the means of its initiation” (Giddens, 1979 on p.61).

Organisations would be best to combine both innovation and organisational learning approaches where organisational experience helps identify future possibilities and translation into novel actions.

8.       A process of learning

Organisational Learning approach describes change, adaptation and improvement to remain viable – where the whole is more than the sum of the individuals and therefore the distribution and organisation of knowledge is important.

9.       An integrative framework

Few authors have attempted to integrate different approaches.  Hosapple and Joshi (2004) conducted a Delphi process to develop and ‘ontology’ for application among KM practitioners, educators and researchers.  Their integrative framework (image p.63) includes four primary elements of culture, strategy, organisational learning and systems & technology.  Culture relates to change management and implementation; strategy to intellectual capital and organisational performance, and organisational learning to exploration, exploitation and knowledge sharing.

This summary and reflections was based on part of Chapter 5: Nature of knowledge and knowing from

Reading KM0001: SDO knowledge mobilisation literature review (5) Crilly T, Jashapara A, Ferlie E (2010) “Research Utilisation & knowledge mobilisation: A scoping review of the literature” Report for the National Institute for Health Research Service Delivery and Organisation programme HMSO