Knowledge and Discourse Matters

4KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT’S THEORIES^*

4.1 FINDING SOME NEW DIRECTIONS

What has been uncovered so far is a highly complex landscape, not least in the diversity of opinion over the nature of knowledge itself. This single issue is shown to impact on most if not all of the other debates in knowledge management (KM): for instance, the definition of KM, ethical issues associated with the management of knowledge, the commodification and reification of knowledge, reportedly high failure rates, the question of how to measure knowledge outcomes, whether knowledge is personal or organizational, or both, and cultural specificity. In considering two of the most prominent themes in KM besides that over the definition of knowledge—knowledge creating and sharing—we find that the diversity of perspective on the former lies behind the variety of claims in respect of influencing and impacting factors in both of these themes. All of these issues, it has been suggested, have potential consequences for research and practice. If the definition of knowledge is the subject of such considerable debate, what of KM’s theories?

It seems that KM finds its origins in many different disciplines, which might imply a broad theoretical spectrum. We can see early evidence of this in an ambitious survey of 160 KM frameworks by the researcher Peter Heisig (see also Sections 1.2 and 2.6). He uses a statistical content analysis method to identify how these frameworks approach three issues: how knowledge is understood, ...