The twentieth century was a period of great social, economic and political transformation. One of the most significant economic changes related to the growing importance and role of knowledge as a source of value for organizations. These developments have been such that the current century is arguably epitomized by a knowledge-based economy, where knowledge, information and ideas are the main source of economic growth (Cooke and Leydesdorff 2006). Due to this and other social and technological changes, such as advances and developments in computer and communication technologies , ongoing globalization, increased deregulation and so on, new patterns of work and business practices are being developed. Meanwhile, we are also dealing with new kinds of workers, with new and different skills and preferences. For example, owing to the rise of artificial intelligence , many traditional jobs, including those of managerial and professional workers, as well as manual workers, if they are not being eliminated, are being transformed into ones that require vastly different knowledge and experience to before (Arntz et al. 2016; Ford 2016; Minsky 2007; Susskind and Susskind 2015).

In view of rapid globalization, immigration and communication, the current era is characterized by change, not stability, and this reality confronts most organizations, societies and governments worldwide (Fuligni and Tsai 2015). The knowledge-based economy is reflected in an increasing emphasis on the dissemination and use of knowledge as a source of competitiveness for organizations and countries. This also relates to the issue of creativity. Robinson (2009) suggests that being creative is about making fresh connections so that we see things in new ways and from different perspectives. Particularly in the current digital era, there is a need for educational institutions and organizational structures capable of developing creative, innovative and problem-solving capacities which encourage interdisciplinarity and growth.

Since 1990s, knowledge management (KM) has emerged as a key discipline to explain how knowledge is created, developed, retained and applied in the workplace and how it enables organizational learning and innovation (Hislop 2010; Quintane et al. 2011; Soto-Acosta et al. 2014). In general, the literature treats KM as a set of practices related to the use of knowledge as a crucial factor to add or generate value (Cardoso et al. 2012; Mouzughi 2013).

It is now more than 20 years since interest in the topic of KM took off in the mid-1990s (Scarbrough and Swan 2001). The initial explosion of interest in the topic was argued by some to be indicative of it being a fad or fashion, with interest likely to not be sustainable in the long term (Hislop 2010). However, contemporary evidence suggests that this is not the case, that the topic is not a passing fad, and that interest in it has sustained itself consistently over the last two decades (Ragab and Arisha 2013; Serenko and Bontis 2013). Further , knowledge management (and the related topic of intellectual capital) has matured into a coherent academic discipline/domain. This is visible in various ways, such as in the number of annual conferences specifically examining KM-related issues, and also in the number of academic journals devoted to disseminating research on the area. Thus, there are currently about 20 specific journals exclusively covering the topics of knowledge management and intellectual capital.

While the field of KM shows evidence of developing into a coherent academic discipline, it is still relatively immature in this respect. First, it is still at pre-paradigmatic phase, with ongoing debate and a general lack of consensus on some core issues, such as the nature of worker’s knowledge, how knowledge work and knowledge workers are conceptualized and so forth. Further, Serenko and Bontis’ (2013) analysis suggests that the field of KM is progressing towards becoming what they categorize as a ‘reference discipline’, a discipline that has a strong theoretical and/or methodological impact on other fields. While KM is still a field which typically borrows, applies and develops concepts from other disciplines (such as management, psychology, information systems), there is increasing evidence that KM literature is being cited and utilized beyond the boundaries of its own discipline.

This Handbook illustrates the depth of research across disciplines. From a strategy perspective, in particular the micro-foundations literature (Barney and Felin 2013; Coff and Kryscynski 2011), scholars are increasingly becoming interested in how different subparts such as knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics, aggregate at the human capital resource (HCR) level (Ployhart and Moliterno 2011).

Several recent meta-reviews have called for more attention on the HCR as distinct from human capital (Ployhart et al. 2014; Nyberg et al. 2014). As part of intellectual capital , scholars are cognizant of the fact that human capital is a component of intellectual capital along with social capital and organization capital. However, recent reviews question whether there is much value in empirically examining human capital as an independent construct. Strategy scholars suggest that the complementarity and emergence of resources at the individual level makes it highly improbable that accurate measures can be obtained, such as the link between KSAOs (knowledge, skills and abilities and other skills) and performance in many prior studies. Instead, they indicate that multiple complementarities are required for complex tasks which are both causally related and interactive (Barney and Felin 2013; Nyberg et al. 2014), such that these resources aggregate at the unit level. Similarly, other strategy scholars point to the value of studying how knowledge accumulates to form dynamic capabilities (Eisenhardt and Martin 2000; Hsu and Wang 2012). Here, the emphasis shifts from only focusing on the HCR to understanding how dynamic capabilities are formed. Previous research suggests that as individual resources are aggregated up (Felin 2012), firms are able to build on the level of embedded heterogeneity by turning multiple bundles of resources into dynamic capabilities (Barney and Felin 2013; Helfat 1997; Helfat and Peteraf 2003).

In this Handbook, the chapter by Murray explores in some detail many of these relationships, pointing to the value of many multidisciplinary approaches to intellectual capital. Finally, given that our focus in the Handbook is on exploring the theory–practice gap, a number of chapters explore the currency of high-performance work systems and the extent to which they support the transformation process from the HCR into valuable functional as well as useable HR policies, with reference to many scholars (Boxall and Macky 2007; Boxall and Macky 2009; Jeong and Shin 2017). In analysing the contributions to KM from these and other disciplines, the Handbook addresses how these processes transform existing stocks of knowledge into new knowledge (Bontis et al. 2002; Lin 2007). However, as we note below, KM researchers have not always been explicit in translating theory to practice, to show how these links evolve.

One characteristic of literature in the KM field that appears to have declined over time is connections with, and impacts on, non-academic practitioners. One indicator of this is a decline in the number of non-academic authors of peer-reviewed KM publications (Serenko et al. 2010). This has led to some talking of a ‘theory–practice gap’ (Ragab and Arisha 2013), while Heisig et al. (2016) remark on the challenges that still remain in identifying the extent to which investments in KM have tangible and measurable impacts on business performance. This represents a challenge for the KM field, and is a topic that is developed more fully in the final chapter of this Handbook, which discusses (potential) future research directions that could be pursued.

This Handbook brings together the latest original scholarship in the field of KM from a variety of disciplines. It provides conceptual and empirical studies from diverse geographical and organizational contexts and, in addition to classical or mainstream approaches, pays specific attention to non-mainstream and non-western approaches to knowledge and its management. The book addresses certain key areas that are relatively underexplored or underdeveloped in the field, such as the impact of KM on performance, the ethics of KM and sustainable KM.

Effective knowledge management is now recognized as an important source of competitive advantage and a key to organizational success. There are generally three core components of KM: people , processes and technology. Some KM approaches take an organizational focus in order to optimize organization design and workflows; some are techno-centric in their orientation, as a means to enhance knowledge integration and creation; some have an ecological focus, where the important aspects are related to people interaction, knowledge and environmental factors as a complex adaptive system similar to a natural ecosystem.

Despite an increasing interest in the competitive advantage that knowledge may provide for organizations and in the significance of knowledge workers and organizational competencies , it is a fact that the notion of knowledge is complex and its relevance to organization theory has been insufficiently developed (Blackler 1995). Approaches to knowledge and its management ar...