The Routledge Companion to Knowledge Management

Jin Chen, Ikujiro Nonaka, Jin Chen, Ikujiro Nonaka

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000585667
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoria: Wissenskapital

Knowledge when properly leveraged and harnessed contributes to effective organizational performance. How much an organization benefits from knowledge would depend on how well knowledge has been managed. There have been challenges to implementing knowledge management in today's dramatically different world from before. This comprehensive reference work is a timely guide to understanding knowledge management.

The book covers key themes of knowledge management which includes the basic framework of knowledge management and helps readers to understand the state of art of knowledge management both from the aspects of theory and practice, from the perspectives of strategy, organization, resources, as well as institution and organizational culture. This reference work reflects the increasingly important role of both philosophy and digital technologies in knowledge management research and practice.

This handbook will be an essential resource for knowledge management scholars, researchers and graduate students.

Part I Theoretical Perspectives in Knowledge Management

1 Outlook on Knowledge Management The Origin and Basic Framework of Knowledge Management

Jin Chen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112150-2

History of Knowledge Management

Athens derived its name from the goddess of wisdom—Athena. In the 5th century BC, Athens became an important center for political, economic, and cultural exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, eclipsing Sparta and other Greek city-states. Due to its emphasis on the use of dispersed knowledge, people often refer to Athens in the 5th century BC as “the miracle of Greece”. Pericles, the Archon of Athens in ancient Greece, said proudly in his speech: “Athens is the school of all of Greece”. The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich A. Hayek (1945) clearly describes that knowledge about change has never existed in a concentrated form. Whenever there is a change, some individual minds always feel the change, but merely partially.

Moreover, no one can possess this knowledge about change. However, Ancient Athens broke through the dilemma described by Hayek and succeeded in effectively using dispersed knowledge to form knowledge aggregation, knowledge alignment, and knowledge codification. Therefore, knowledge management has played a critical role in the city-state construction of ancient Athens. Table 1.1 shows ancient Athens and its use of dispersed knowledge.

Table 1.1 Ancient Athens and Use of Dispersed Knowledge

Process	Problem	Solution
Aggregation of knowledge	How to apply scattered and valuable knowledge to the needed problem	Promoting information communication through strong and weak ties in social network
Alignment of knowledge	How do people with knowledge align their actions to achieve common goals?	Encouraging the public to master common sense and participate in public activities regularly
Codification of knowledge	How to reduce the opportunity cost of acquiring and sharing knowledge	Reducing inequality in knowledge sharing through the establishment of formal and informal systems

Management Master’s View on Knowledge

Robert M. Grant (1996), the famous strategic management master, once said that knowledge serves as the foundation of all critical advances since the origin of human civilization. Nowadays, the amount of knowledge stock relates directly to productivity and economic growth. The real challenge is not to discuss the knowledge economy and the concept of knowledge workers in general but to explore the essence of knowledge in depth and the use of knowledge which is quite different at other times.

The Origin of Knowledge Management

Peter F. Drucker (1999) believes that “the most valuable asset of an organization in the 21st century is the knowledge workers within the organization and their productivity”. Therefore, the organization must encourage enterprise knowledge sharing through knowledge management and improve its adaptability and innovation capabilities through collective wisdom. Knowledge flow within and across organizational boundaries enables enterprises to respond to external demands quickly and predict the market environment changes using the knowledge resources obtained. In the age of the knowledge economy, the cultivation of corporate competitiveness is inseparable from knowledge management.

The development of knowledge management is closely related to the concept of “intellectual capital”. In 1969, in the letter to a Polish economist, John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out that intellectual capital is not only pure knowledge in the form of knowledge but also includes intellectual activities; that is, intellectual capital is not only fixed capital but also a process of effective use of knowledge and a means to achieve goals. The best model of intellectual capital is the Skandia model, which was created in 1991 by Leif Edvinsson (1996), Intellectual Capital Manager of Skandia, drawing on the ideas of an “intangible balance sheet” and “balanced scorecard” in combination with Skandia’s practice.

The Practical Background of Knowledge Management

Since the 1980s, due to intensified competition, downsizing has become a common strategy for companies to increase profits. However, the downsizing strategy has led to the loss of necessary knowledge, and companies have begun to adopt a “knowledge management” strategy, trying to store and maintain employee knowledge that is in line with the company’s future interests. Scholars created theoretical frameworks of knowledge management that preceded related standards. APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center) defines knowledge management as a conscious strategy adopted by an organization to ensure members can promptly acquire the knowledge they need. Effective knowledge management can help people share information and then put it into practice in different ways to improve organizational performance ultimately. According to China’s National Standard for Knowledge Management (GB/T 23703.2-2010), knowledge management is an activity of planning and managing knowledge itself, the process of knowledge creation, and the application of knowledge.

Two Typical Models of Knowledge Management

The first one is the Thomas H. Davenport (1996, 1998) model, in which knowledge is a dynamic mixture of factors, including structured experience, values, relative information, and expert opinions. It provides the framework for measuring and absorbing new information. Such an explicit model is well illustrated by the knowledge management model at Siemens (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Siemens’ Knowledge Management Model

The other one is the Ikujiro Nonaka (1994) model. In the mid- to late 1990s, Japanese professor Ikujiro Nonaka further developed a management system for intellectuals and practitioners. Through innovative case studies of Japanese companies, such as Sony, Panasonic, Honda, Canon, NEC, and Fuji Copiers, he attributed their success to the knowledge creation capabilities of the organization, which can fully mobilize the individual knowledge hidden deep in their minds in an “organized way” (Figure 1.2).

Based on the knowledge dichotomy by Polanyi (2009), Ikujiro Nonaka (1994) subdivided knowledge into “explicit knowledge” and “tacit knowledge”, starting from the relationship between these two concepts. He believes that the creation of new knowledge depends on the accumulation of tacit knowledge, which means that organizations have to explore implicit beliefs, intuitions, and inspirations in employees’ minds to produce new knowledge. In Ikujiro Nonaka’s perspective, knowledge is embedded in subjective experience, abstract concepts, standard operating procedures, systematic documents, or specific techniques. His knowledge management concepts are mostly new theories and new insights obtained from philosophy and sociology, which have great significance for reference.

Figure 1.2 Ikujiro Nonaka’s SECI Model

Ikujiro Nonaka drew on the wisdom of Eastern and Western philosophies to construct the knowledge creation theory based on the successful practical experience of Japanese companies. With the socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization (SECI) model as the core, he organically combined subjective and objective, tacit and explicit knowledge, direct experience, and logical analysis to form a series of classics in knowledge management. Based on the concept proposed originally by Kitaro Nishida (1992), the Japanese philosopher Ikujiro Nonaka (1998, 2000) defined “Ba” as a shared context in motion, which is for the continuous creation of practical meanings toward a certain objective. In “Ba”, knowledge is shared, created, and practiced. “Ba” also provides knowledge with energy, quality, and place to complete the transformation of individual knowledge into shared knowledge, and it rises along the knowledge creation spiral. “Ba” is the site of creative interaction. The space, time, and scene in “Ba” may be real or virtual; it may only exist on the cognitive level or a mixture of the above. “Ba” will appear and disappear along the real timeline. “Ba” is not limited to a single organization but can be created across organizational boundaries. “Ba” can be created as a joint meeting with suppliers, as an alliance with competitors, or as an interactive event with customers, universities, local communities, or government. Organization members transcend the boundary by participating in “Ba”, and when “Ba” connects with other “fields”, they further transcend the boundaries.

In the Ikujiro Nonaka model, tacit and explicit knowledge interact to constitute a series of knowledge creation processes. Knowledge creation enriches tacit knowledge while making it explicit, then combines with explicit knowledge and forms a new tacit knowledge again based on practice. This dynamic spiral movement process consists of four parts: socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization. Professor Ikujiro Nonaka took the initials of the four English words and named this process the SECI Model (Ikujiro Nonaka, 1994). This model is applied to individuals, groups, and organizations and needs to adapt to the social context.

Then, the Hitotsubashi Paradigm, introduced by Professor Nonaka (2015), is a widely accepted knowledge management model in the academic and practical worlds. This model has potential valuable extensions: adding technology factors, emphasizing value realization, focusing on breakthrough innovation, and invoking general wisdom. Therefore, we have to continue to pursue improvement.

The Latest Developments in Knowledge Management

First, the Carnegie Mellon paradigm is worthy of reference. Chinese firms’ knowledge management system derives primarily from information management infrastructures. The second is to apply further and improve the Hitotsubashi Paradigm, emphasizing the knowledge creation spiral and practical wisdom. Finally, we hope knowledge management forms a Chinese Paradigm, emphasizing meaning pursuit and technological innovation and integrating innovation and knowledge management. The above three aspects underlie what the traditional Carnegie Mellon Paradigm and Hitotsubashi Paradigm lack and need further exploration.

Therefore, the development of knowledge management should emphasize the breadth of social interaction and the depths of information technology drive and philosophical guidance.

Extending the Breadth of Social Interaction

It has been 25 years since the introduction of knowledge creation theory. The world has undergone profound and drastic changes in these two-and-a-half decades. For those who need to apply the knowledge creation theory, how significant are the challenges and difficulties they face? Along with the drastic changes in the world, the knowledge scene has also undergone profound changes. The organization is unable to complete the continuous horizontal movement from “socialization” to “externalization”, “combination”, and “internalization”. Otherwise, it cannot complete the vertical transition from a SECI transformation to the next SECI transformation.

Based on this, Ikujiro Nonaka (2011) proposed the importance of practical wisdom or phronesis as six abilities to deepen the knowledge creation...