Leading Issues in Knowledge

Management
Edited by
Charles Despres


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Leading Issues in Knowledge Management
Volume One.
Copyright The authors

First published April 2011 by
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Printed by Ridgeway Press in the UK.
i
Contents
Introduction to Leading Issues in Knowledge Management Research: ........ iii
The Emergence and Diffusion of the Concept of Knowledge Work ............. 1
Hanna Timonen and Kaija-Stiina Paloheimo
Situated, Embodied Human Interaction and its Implications for Context
Building in Knowledge Mobilisation Design ................................................ 25
Erkki Patokorpi
Comparison of Approaches toward Formalising Context: Implementation
Characteristics and Capacities .................................................................... 45
William Loyola
Effects of Knowledge Representation on Knowledge Acquisition and
Problem Solving ......................................................................................... 67
Mohamed Khalifa and Kathy Ning Shen
Does Intellectual Capital Management Make a Difference?
A Critical Case Study Application of Structuration Theory ......................... 80
John Tull and John Dumay
A Hierarchical Modelling Approach to Intellectual Capital
Development ............................................................................................ 101
Eckhard Ammann
Folksonomies, Collaborative Filtering and e-Business: is Enterprise 2.0
One Step Forward and Two Steps Back? .................................................. 121
Kevin Johnston
Virtual Communities of Practice: Investigating Motivations and
Constraints in the Processes of Knowledge Creation and Transfer .......... 136
Ana Maria Ramalho Correia, Anabela Mesquita and Alice Paulos
Exploring Knowledge Processes in User-Centred Design ......................... 154
Kaisa Still
The Impact of Stories ................................................................................ 175
Joanna Sinclair
Leading Issues in Knowledge Management
ii

iii
Introduction to Leading Issues
in Knowledge Management
Research:

Knowledge Management, 2011
Comparatively few academics have the opportunity to be present at the
founding of an academic field and then accompany it through a certain
state of maturity. Yet this is probably the case for many of us who work in
or around Knowledge Management. It is mine, coming of age as I did in
1995 just when KM was stepping onto the steeper slope of its manage-
ment fashion wave. Infectious times for a young academic: it was obvi-
ous that the cognitive sciences, organization theory, symbolic action,
enlightened HR, managerial psychology were all on the cusp of knowl-
edge-intensive organizations and socio-economic systems. Consulting
houses were offering research contracts. The worlds first CKO was about
to be named. Tom Stewart was pollinating the corporate mind, companies
were buying, journals appearing and universities had KM doctoral pro-
grams on the drawing boards.

There is sometimes an aura around periods like this that somehow projects
order from underlying chaos, as characterizes an adolescents volition.
Auras of this nature tend to dissolve. In an entertaining article that ap-
peared at this time De Long & Seemann (2000, p. 43) wrote, Knowledge
management is an inherently complex and confusing concept. A more
clairvoyant statement is seldom penned. A year earlier I had published a
study with my colleague Daniele Chauvel which, with an eye toward the
Sociology of Knowledge, was titled Knowledge Management(s), the plural
being designed to make a point (Despres & Chauvel, 1999). In this work we
applied a (then) state-of-the-art semantic algorithm to a textbase of KM
articles to understand what was being discussed, by whom, from which
Leading Issues in Knowledge Management
iv
perspective, to what end, with what results, and arrived at the visual rep-
resentation in Figure 1:

Figure 1: A semantic map of Knowledge Management Discourse, 1999

After labouring to develop an orderly taxonomy from the various litera-
tures we wrote, Knowledge Management is clearly on the slippery slope of
being intuitively important but intellectually elusive, which was a clair-
voyant phrase in its own right. I believe the general frustration lay in the
obviousness of dealing directly with knowledge in the knowledge age
coupled to the difficulty of operationalizing the essential and surrounding
factors in an intellectually coherent way. Those concerned with real
business benefits were also frustrated as evidenced by this tract from
Wilson (2002):

Some techniques fail, or at least are dropped from the repertoire, be-
cause they are Utopian in character This was the case with business
process re-engineering, but businesses quickly realised that the costs of
carrying out BPR throughout the organization would be crippling in fact,
two thirds of BPR efforts are said to have failed (Hall, et al., 1994). Knowl-
Charles Despres
v
edge management (whatever it is) also shows signs of being offered as a
Utopian ideal and the results are likely to be similar.

Despite this and the underlying conceptual confusions (that were increas-
ingly discussed by authors), KM was clearly surfing the fashion wave at the
turn of the Century as indicated by Wilsons own (2002) search for Knowl-
edge Management in article titles listed in the ISI Web of Science from
1981 to 2002 (Figure 2):

Figure 2: Numbers of articles with Knowledge Management in their title
as listed by the ISI Web of Science, 1981-2002 (from Wilson, 2002)

It is my view that the fashion wave crested around 2003-4 and things took
on a different hue - still progressive in the main but less euphoric and
dampened by the realization that a general theory of knowledge and its
management was not just elusive, but absurd. As an example Alvesson &
Karreman (2001) published the alluring title, Odd Couple: Making Sense of
the Curious Concept of Knowledge Management, which (along with others)
injected a critical perspective, reminded us of previous works and sug-
gested, caution is called for against the risk of recycling old ideas
Leading Issues in Knowledge Management
vi
through relabeling key terms. (p. 1015). Indeed: the marketplace was then
aptly and mysteriously transmuted any given organizational process into a
knowledge process in the space of a billing cycle. The field was also clearly
divided with ICT-KM on one side and a potpourri of socio-economic think-
ing on the other. An interesting paper by Subramani, Nerur & Mahapatra
(2003) identified 8 schools of thought at the intersection that KM had be-
come at this point, as displayed in this multidimensional scaling map in
Figure 3, and my reading of the field indicates that this is conservative:

Figure 3: A multidimensional scaling map of intellectual positions in
Knowledge Management, 1990-2002 (from Subramani, Nerur & Maha-
patra, 2003)

It was into this potpourri that I reached to present the following title to a
colloquium some 3 years ago: KM is a nice idea. Unfortunately, the field
hasnt met expectations. This unsympathetic pronouncement was the
product of frustrations and concerns I had with the academic rigor of the
field of Knowledge Management: in my view it was neither posing influen-
tial questions, nor inciting serious institutional change, but rather reacting
to events in patchwork fashion via an impressive / depressive collage of
intellectual traditions. I therefore launched a polemic:

due its lack of theoretical foundations and disciplinary mechanisms, the
field of Knowledge Management (KM) now qualifies as a multidiscipli-
Charles Despres
vii
nary
1

1
It is perhaps useful to note that multidisciplinarity implies the melding of multiple perspec-
tives focused on a problem / issue in the search of practical results, and is by definition ana-
thema to a discrete and reigning paradigm. Multidiscipliarity is not interdisciplinarity, though
the distinctions are primarily in terms of requisite (disciplinary) variety.
intersection of rather disparate interests, intellects and applications.
This is disappointing to the academics and practitioners who expected
more when the idea first surfaced some 25 years ago ... more in terms of
post-modern organizations and enlightened human interaction, more in
terms of knowledge economics, more in terms of knowledge-centric socie-
ties. More, in short, of a new field that would institutionalize convergence
so as to set new research agendas, define new problematics and identify
new practices for the new millennium.

KM has not distinguished itself from its tributary disciplines (20 or more),
all of which approach knowledge and management in their own pecu-
liar ways. There is no theory of economics, organization, systems or human
interaction specific to KM. There are no technologies, applications, prac-
tices or prescriptions specific to KM. There are, however, abundant signs of
multi-disciplinarity: when convenient we find individuals, theories and
practices from various perspectives disembarking to discuss organizational
schemes and human interaction contingent on the wicked problem of
knowledge in the postmodern age

The thinking observer will conclude that the actor and his/her knowledge
have always been at the center of work, management and organization in
contemporary social science. That fundamental constructs began to
change in the mid-20th Century is clear; how they have been refined and
focused by KM is less clear. We are now some 40 years forward from Bells
clarion call (The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 1968), and 25 years out
from Zuboffs map of the intellectual landscape (In the Age of the Smart
Machine, 1984). The deeper currents of Modernity and Postmodernity
have underlain these and related works from the 1950s onward. From this
perspective the general observation is that KM surfaced in academic are-
nas circa 1990 as the offspring of endogenous developments in kindred
areas (ICT, economics, sociology, organization theory, communication,
management ), and its twenty years of interdisciplinary discussion is little
more than a blip on the academic clock. Is it unreasonable to expect more
from a young and applied field of study?
Perhaps, but there are encouraging signs on the horizon.
Leading Issues in Knowledge Management
viii

To begin with the obvious, the Sociology of Knowledge teaches that
changes in disciplinary frameworks occur over decades, if not centuries,
and the Kuhnian view is that transition periods are messy, confusing af-
fairs. Given the fact that Karl Wiig first uttered the meme Knowledge Man-
agement in 1986 (Wiig, 1997), we should perhaps forgive the multidiscipli-
nary messiness and focus on the bigger picture: irreversible change is obvi-
ously underway (as usual) and despite its oxymoronic label KM is in a posi-
tion to sensemake and perhaps guide the transformations of increasing
scope and rapidity that grip life in the 21
st
Century. After all, the Academy
institutionalized Management as a science despite the considerable un-
dergrowth encountered along the way (Koontz, 1961; 1980).

Secondly, it is clear to me that technology continues to pull us forward.
The managerial and organizational sciences have scurried behind to make
sense of the forward thrust, as is perhaps proper in our areas of study. Just
as Knowledge Management followed inescapably from Information Man-
agement, and before that Data Management, and before that the circa-
1946 advent of the electronic computer, so are we today entering a 2.0 era
that is pregnant with both positive and dimly-perceived consequences. As I
write the worlds media agree that Tunisias popular revolt sparked Egypts
and Libyas popular revolts, that these events have set the Middle East
ablaze with popular aspirations, and that none of this would have occurred
absent Twitter, or Facebook, or Google. Who could have predicted this a
year ago?

Within our academic fields the Web 2.0 technologies are similarly hinting
at Enterprise 2.0 designs, where the fit with existing disciplinary founda-
tions in particular with organizational authority structures is achieved
only through intellectual gymnastics, if at all. Should the Cluetrain Mani-
festo (1999) be right, a brave new world is being announced at this very
moment, opening vistas that may suit KM very well indeed. For evidence,
and as a popular sign of things to come, consider the trends announced in
Figure 4
2

2
This data was obtained from Google Trends on 22 February 2011:
:
http://www.google.com/trends. According to Google, Google Trends analyzes a portion of
Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter,
relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph
with the results our Search Volume Index graph.
Charles Despres
ix


Figure 4: Google Trends average worldwide traffic 2004 2010: Knowledge
Management, Web 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0 (unequal scales searches con-
ducted independently)
hirdly, the consulting hype and silver bullet mantras that draped them-
selves over KM so conspicuously at the turn of the Century have faded
with the arrival of new management fashions (apparently a loose cloud
of internal / external networks (social, task, project, innovative) and im-
ages of an omni-connected future). This is a particular relief to me, from
this important perspective:
Emotionally charged and largely uncritical discourse
vaunting the quasi-magical potency of a management
technique characterizes the upswing of a fashion wave in its
popularity, and a more thoughtful and critical attitude to-
ward this technique characterizes the downswing ...
(Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999: 735)
Most actors agree that for 5 years or more KM has been on the downswing
of the management fashion wave and entering a new period (consider Fig-
ure 4 once again). Changes in the tone of practitioner publications are pal-
Leading Issues in Knowledge Management
x
pable (less euphoria, more deliberation, results-oriented). Changes in the
quality of academic publications are similarly unmistakable (more depth,
more co-authors, fewer gurus, improved methodologies). I am encouraged
that the field is increasingly conscious of itself a sign of impending wis-
dom as evidenced by internal debates (e.g., Zhu, 2006; Swan, 2004), the
appearance of Sientometrics (e.g., Serenko, Bontis & Grant, 2009), co-
citation analyses (e.g., Subramani, M., Nerur, S.P., and Mahapatra 2002)
and critical reviews of its academic journals (e.g., Serenko & Bontis, 2009).

These developments point naturally toward the selections for this book.
My intent was to feature works that are on the cutting edge of the field,
that deepen the thinking in KM, and that do so in a scholarly, critical sort of
way. As an example of how this plays out: the impact, the import, the
foundational nature of context in any discussion of knowledge has been
cruelly lacking in this field and three papers in the book are devoted to
the subject. This is not to say that works discussing situated action, Struc-
turation or enactment are elsewhere absent; it simply reflects my consid-
ered opinion that their impact on the fields overall research agenda is
faint, and lacking. And so it is with the other selections each an important
statement in its own right, each hopefully a contribution to the ongoing
maturation of Knowledge Management.
Charles Despres
Research Professor
SKEMA Business School
Sophia Antipolis, France
March 2011
References
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Davenport, E. Mundane Knowledge Management and Microlevel Organ-
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Charles Despres
xi
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