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Perceptions
of Knowledge, Knowledge Society, and Knowledge Management*
Knowledge Society
The
description of our society as a knowledge society is only one approach
among many others to characterize the society we live in (authors
prefer to talk of
media society, risk society, multiple option society, individualized
society, multi-cultural society, global society etc., for example; for
an overview over the authors
and their different approaches see, e.g., Pongs 1999, 2000). Above all,
to describe
our society as a knowledge society is a self-description from an
internal perspec
tive of the society we live in, it is not a description of our society
from an external
point of view (see, e.g., Nassehi 2000a).
Krohn (2000) identifies two different sets
of variables that can be emphasized to analyze the contemporary
societal change
toward knowledge society: technological innovation and institutional
transforma
tion. Following Krohn (2000: 1), "the impact of technological change on
the
organizational and cultural institutions of society as well as on the
enormous mon
etary and cultural investments of corporate and individual agencies in
developing
and using new knowledge" build the interrelated focus of these two
aspects.
The term of the knowledge society is strongly influenced by the early
studies
in the 1960s on the (economically) dominant role of knowledge. The
contribution
of knowledge work to the economy was first clearly emphasized by Fritz
Machlup
(1962) (on the notion of knowledge work see Hayman and Elliman 2000).
Peter Drucker (1969) provided guidelines for mastering the
discontinuities brought
about by information technology and knowledge work. Robert E. Lane
(1966) is
known as one of the first authors who noted the term "knowledgeable
society".
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Amitai Etzioni (1968) and Daniel
Bell (1975
(1973)) further investigated the emerging predominant role of
(especially theoret
ical) knowledge as the new "axial principle" of society, particularly
in the fields of politics, work and science.
A parallel line of reasoning can be found by reform
Marxists in the Richta report (Richta 1971) of 1968 and the Japanese
“Plan for an
Information Society" of 1972 (see Masuda 1990 (1981)). Porat (1977)
contributed
a larger set of empirical data to the conceptual path toward a
knowledge society,
Lyon (1988) reflected on the validity of the concept of an information
society, and
Edelstein (1978) studied the different developments in the USA and
Japan in a
comparative analysis (as cited by Krohn 2000).
During the 1980s and early 1990s,
the academic and public awareness became steadily intensified "and
extended the
general themes of the societal centrality of knowledge to a broad
variety of fields
of investigation" (Krohn 2000: 1-2): the reconstruction of class
structure in the
knowledge society (Schiller 1984 (1981)) and its relation to
postmodernism (Lyotard 1984; Poster 1990).
The growing popularity of the term knowledge society during the 1990s
was
fostered especially through the work of Peter Drucker and Robert Reich,
both researchers in management theory. With regard to business
management, features
of knowledge society are strongly emphasized as the spread of expert
culture (see
several contributions in Stehr and Ericson 1992) and the primary
importance of intellectual capital as the wealth of organizations
(Stewart 1997). The OECD
can be
identified as an important promoter of the development toward a
knowledge-based
economy in its influential working paper of 1996 (OECD 1996)
and
various subsequent reports and activities (e.g., OECD 2001a,b). In
Germany, the parliament
(Deutscher Bundestag)
provides a comprehensive outline of a global
knowledge
society (Enquête-Kommission
2002: 259-308).
Compared to the first studies and expectations of the developments
toward knowledge society as presented in the 1960s and 1970s, things
have changed today. Professional knowledge workers are not confronted
with the task to find any solution for a given problem, they are
confronted with the problem that they know too much to reach the
solution (and to choose their actions within a given time; see also
various contributions in Hennings et al. 2003).
Double-Layered Knowledge Life Cycle (Source: Müller-Prothmann 2006, p. 51)
Knowledge is not only the resource for the industrial production
anymore, it is its subject. Not the knowledge assets (or repositories)
are the critical factors today, but structures and processes of
knowledge production and transfer. And since we all know that there is
not one solution, if there is any, our aim is to provide some very
small steps that may provide analytical insights and practically
relevant methods among others to address these critical factors of
knowledge production and transfer in your organization. If we do not
want to turn the visions of a knowledge society to being useless, we
should try to clearly integrate the recognition and acceptance of
complexities as its integral basic characteristics. Then, knowledge
society does not aim at the reduction and overcoming of complexities,
but at dealing and living with them through individual, organizational,
technological, and societal strategies and processes of adaptation.
Framework of Knowledge
To summarize the various aspects of knowledge briefly, we can follow
Wenger et al. (2002: 8-11) who note that knowledge
- lives in the human act of
knowing,
- is tacit as well as explicit,
- is social as well as individual,
- is dynamic.
Knowledge as understood here is a human act and it is socially
constructed. “From the perspective of common sense, the world of
everyday life is taken for granted as reality. It is simply,
compelling, and self-evidently there" (Holzner and Marx 1979: 81). From
this perspective, knowledge cannot mean "the ‘grasping’ of reality
itself", but only "the ‘mapping’ of experienced reality by some
observer", and thus, "we are compelled to define ‘knowledge’ as the
communicable mapping of some aspect of experienced reality by an
observer in symbolic terms" (Holzner 1968: 20; as cited by Holzner and
Marx 1979: 93). Frames of reference are defined as structures
consisting of "taken-for-granted assumptions, preferences for symbol
systems, and analytical devices within which an observer’s inquiry
proceeds" and can be “explicitly codified and articulated" or "remain
tacit and lack specific symbolic articulation" (Holzner and Marx 1979:
99-100). Whether specialized and articulated very precisely or not,
every frame of reference "contains a limited set of rules for mapping
alternative frames of reference" (Holzner and Marx 1979: 102). This
argumentation leads Holzner and Marx to describe social validation of
knowledge as inter-subjective spaces within the context of shared
frames of reference and through reality tests (Holzner and Marx 1979:
103-106).
Different from the construction of everyday knowledge are character and
processes of the construction of intellectual objects in the social
sciences (Schütz 1971: 39-76). Following Berger and Luckmann, "the
sociology
of knowledge must concern itself with whatever passes for
‘knowledge’ in a society, regardless of the ultimate validity or
invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such ‘knowledge’" (Berger and
Luckmann 1967 (1966): 3). And insofar the subject of the sociology of
knowledge is “all human ‘knowledge’ [that] is developed, transmitted
and maintained in social situations" and the understanding of the
processes involved (Berger and Luckmann 1967 (1966): 3). Exactly this
conception of knowledge is contended to be a useful definition for the
study of knowledge and the processes
of knowledge generation, transfer and conservation within and between
organizations. From our perspective, knowledge includes all human
knowledge that is generated, transmitted, maintained and—important to
add—forgotten within organizational situations.
Organizational situations that involve knowledge processes are always
socially constituted. Weber introduced the prominent distinction
between human behavior, action and social action in sociology.
Following this distinction, knowledge communication in social networks
is inevitably constituted as social knowledge communication. Action is
human behavior to which the acting individual attaches subjective
meaning, whereas social action is action when, by virtue of the
subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual, it takes
account of the behavior of others and is thereby guided. From this
perspective, knowledge communication in social networks is
communication of knowledge between social entities that are
intentionally oriented toward each other. An acting individual attaches
a subjective meaning to his or her communication of knowledge while he
or she takes the behavior of others into account, and is thereby
guided. This kind of social perspective on processes of knowledge
communication takes into account factors and prerequisites for mutual
orientation of the acting individuals like shared language, common
standards as well as social and situational norms.
Knowledge Management
Generally speaking, economic relationships are being developed for the
solution of problems of the economic subjects. Beginning in the 1960s, information
economics (Stigler 1961) focused on information processes
based on costs and benefits calculations derived from treating
information as an economic good (see Darby and Karni 1973; Nelson
1970). The new
institutional economics laid the ground for studies on
institutional and organizational structures by which economic actors
engage with each other (Coase 1960; Alchian and Woodward 1988).
From the perspective of business economics, knowledge is usually
distinguished with regard to (1) knowledge as object and (2) knowledge
as process (see, e.g., Heckert 2002: 13). The object-based
approach is widely prominent as a theoretic foundation of information
technology based solutions from a management perspective, while the
process-oriented approach refers to philosophical, psychological and
sociological approaches even from an economic perspective (see Sveiby
1997: 24-50). If we assume that we can indeed manage knowledge, the aim
of an organization must be to manage knowledge as an object as well as
to manage the processes of knowledge (see also Zack 1999a: 46).
A different perspective emerges from the focus of social construction
of knowledge. From this perspective, knowledge is primarily in the
heads of individuals (Wersig 2000), or as McDermott puts it "knowing is
a human act" (McDermott
2002). Armbrecht talks of "purists" who "consider ‘knowledge’ to be
that which is within and between the minds of individuals and is
tacitly possessed" (Armbrecht et al. 2001: 29). From this perspective,
we cannot manage knowledge: "data and information may be managed, and
information resources may be managed, but knowledge (i.e., what we
know) can never be managed, except by the individual knower and, even
then, only imperfectly" (Wilson 2002). Rather, we can try to manage
influence factors like organizational environments or communication
processes that facilitate and improve processes of knowledge creation
and sharing.
Especially from the perspective of knowledge processes within R&D
environments, managing knowledge is not literally possible. Rather, as
Armbrecht et al. (2001: 30) put it, "we are really interested in
facilitating knowledge flows". And as they continue, "[t]he expansion
process creates new knowledge beyond that contained in the individuals’
heads. This is the ‘between mind’s knowledge’ related to interactions
that take place between individuals and within teams" (Armbrecht et al.
2001: 31). And we should add: that takes place in and between
organizations, institutions, disciplines and societal spheres as well.
From this perspective, our conception of knowledge management deals
with conditions and influence factors of knowledge generation, sharing,
use, conservation, and forgetting on individual, organizational, and
societal levels. Thus, knowledge
communities and social networks play an important role in knowledge
management.
* A
comprehensive version of this text and all references can be found in
the book
presented here.
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