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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Crane, Lesley (Lesley Margaret), 1960–
Knowledge and discourse matters : relocating knowledge management’s sphere of interest onto language / Lesley Crane.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-93185-1 (cloth)
1. Knowledge management. 2. Discourse analysis. I. Title.
HD30.2.C7225 2016
658.4′038–dc23
2015020798
Cover image courtesy of VLADGRIN/Getty
For Phil, who put up with a lot. My love as ever.
And for Anne Whyte, my friend, who asked the troubling question ‘so what?’
| Figure 1 | A taxonomy of knowledge management’s theories |
| Figure 2 | The flow of influence in unconscious mental processes |
| Table 1 | Knowledge Sharing Factors Mapped to Thematic Categories of Context, Identity, Risk, and Trust |
| Table 2 | Specifies the Source for Figure |
| Table 3 | Comparison between Implicit Learning and Knowledge Management on the Features of Tacit Knowledge |
Many years ago, the company I worked for had just been bought by IBM as one of the basic elements of what was to become IBM Global Services. I had been a part of it for well over a decade, rising from a developer working on decision support systems through to general management and to a leading role in strategy. The GENUS program I put together combined Rapid Application Methods, Legacy System Management, and Object Orientation in a synthesis that had sufficient novelty to win marketing awards against Microsoft’s latest release of Windows and was also credited with being a significant part of the turnaround of the company that made us attractive to IBM in the first place. Freed by the acquisition into a free-floating do whatever interests you role with some important top cover, I had a chance to go back to my origins in decision support and pick up the reins again with the emerging disciplines of Knowledge Management. That led to my joining Larry Prusak in the Institute of Knowledge Management, working on counterterrorism before and after the tragic events of 9/11 and eventually into complexity theory and the newly formed Centre for Applied Complexity at Bangor University in my native North Wales.
Now, I tell that story, not just to set a context for what follows, but also because it tells some of the story of knowledge management over the years, a story that continues in fits and starts, but continues nevertheless. Lesley’s book, to which I am honored to write the foreword (and flattered to be referenced therein), is a significant contribution to the development of the field, but as importantly to an understanding of its journey. My goal here is not to summarize her argument but to compliment it. I do not agree with the idea that Discourse Analysis is the solution—in fact, that is not what Lesley is suggesting—but rather, as she notes, it is a valuable and neglected aspect of the field that could extend the directions of current thinking. I also think that she has made a significant contribution simply by pointing out the absence of coherent theories of language from most thinkers and practitioners in the domain. Her work and analysis would be important for that insight alone, but she also goes on to expand the theory and practice of one approach to rectify that omission.
So what do we know about knowledge in organizations? There is little dispute that it is a critical aspect of service provision, competitive advantage, strategic development, and so on. Hence, the value is rarely disputed; however, the practice of knowledge management is controversial in theory, practice, and adoption. The reality is that most knowledge management initiatives rarely survive in the long term, or at best become a subsection of Information Management within the IT function. A variation in professional services companies sees it manifested as the modern version of what used to be a library or registry. But it is no longer strategic as a function, despite being strategic as a practice. In the early days, we had Directors of Knowledge; now, they are few and far between. Not only that, companies seem to go through multiple adoption and abandonment cycles. In one industry that will remain nameless to protect the naively innocent, I have seen three knowledge management teams arise and two fall over similar time scales. The team, having established a reputation on the conference circuit, then went on to form a consultancy unit that sold recipe-type approaches based on their self-reported successes. I confidently expect the third team to follow in due course. The various institutes rose and died in their turn. But despite this, people keep coming back; the trouble is that by the time they come back, they have forgotten (the supreme irony for knowledge management) what went wrong last time. Thus, they are doomed to repeat the same follies with the same inevitable result.
Lesley correctly points to a failure of definition in the field as a reason for this, or more specifically the brutal fact that the dominant paradigm is to treat knowledge as an object, with tacit knowledge an inconvenience of little value that walks out of the door each night until it is codified in digital form, at which point it becomes an asset. That paradigm traces back to The Knowledge Creating Company and Nonaka’s SECI model, now rebranded as BA. There are two facts about that book that people tend to neglect:
The net result was that knowledge management as a discipline started in the wrong place. The problem was made worse by the obsession with case-based approaches in management science. That meant academics, who had knowledge that might have prevented the lapse to objectivization of intangibles, were not engaged. A very, very few of us, with a background in Philosophy, realized at the start that the paradigm being adopted was deeply limited, but we were voices crying in the wilderness.
One early method I created in an attempt to stem the flow toward codification was a simple form of mapping together with a perspective question to force people to think about the issue from a more diverse set of lens. The process involved self-ethnography, reporting of decisions, and associated information flows by employees. The results were then clustered, like-with-like, and we consolidated the information flows. The result was rather like a spider’s web in the early morning after a light rain. You could see a coherent pattern, but it was messy. We then went to each decision cluster and asked three questions of each decision:
Known as the ASHEN model, it continues in use (often in modified form) to this day. The goal of the ASHEN question was to look at knowledge from multiple perspectives, but in such a way that people would realize that some things simply could not be codified and in consequence employee retention was more effective than codification. We also compared the process map with the decision map to show gaps between actual practice and formal process and then matched the knowledge objects (any grouping of ASHEN aspects coherent enough to be managed) against core business goals. From the dependency maps that resulted, we ended up with portfolios of pragmatic knowledge projects. A knowledge management program thus became a portfolio of knowledge projects that emerged from day-to-day practice, informed by strategic needs. That method is still in play to this day, and if anything is growing in use.
The process of engaging in ethnography around decisions also produced an accidental effect. We found that decisions were best revealed in stories, so we went hunting for those. Not the grand stories of workshops or interviews, but the day-to-day stories of practice that inform and instruct. From those, we could extract the decisions. As a group, we came to the story from the perspective of discovery, not communication, and that produced one of the genuinely novel approaches of the last two decades, namely, scalable or distributed ethnography, now manifested in the SenseMaker® product. With the benefit of hindsight, it was inevitable that narrative forms of knowledge retention, capture, and distribution would emerge. We all come from cultures in which oral history dominated for ages. In work with Boisot, we identified that knowledge acts as a transitionary device between the purely tacit knowledge of the person and the explicit knowledge of the database. Since then, that approach has extended to Development Sector evaluation, Patient Journeys, preradicalization monitoring, and understanding of entrepreneurial culture. That is, to name a limited number of what are now myriad applications, some of which might have been labeled knowledge programs in the past, but these days stand on their own.
While narrative is a form of language, I accepted Deacon’s (The Symbolic Species) and others’ refutation of Chomsky’s idea of grammar being genetic. We realized that narrative carries with it essential ambiguity and constant change. That can be interpreted by Discourse Analysis but not in real time. So we moved to self-created and high-abstraction metadata to allow novel capture, interpretation, and advocacy-based solutions. That means we could allow field engineers to capture narratives on the go, rather than write reports or be forced into a community of practice. The self-signification meant that recall of fragmented knowledge across silos became easy without the formal structures of taxonomies and Communities of Practice. We started to move to peer-to-peer knowledge flow, allowing conceptual blending of diverse fragmented memories and observations to come together in the context of a need to create a real and novel solution.
Also the fragmented, loosely coupled aspect of micronarratives (as they became known) required new theories of systems and an encounter with the literature of Complex Adaptive Systems Theory. Known as the science of uncertainty, complexity deals with systems that have no linear causality, and this cannot be engineered to goals. Instead, they are dispositional and need to evolve; the management of evolution is a very different process from that envisaged by most engineers. That led to the Cynefin framework, which appears in two award winning articles: Complex Acts of Knowing and A Leader’s Guide to Decision Making. Lesley references the framework later in this book and kindly shows its capacity to embrace conflicting theories in a single framework by recognizing different states or types of causality that permit and disallow different approaches to both understanding and management, not just of knowledge but also more widely.
I have recounted this as a narrative of accidental discovery, as that is what happened. But the discoveries were informed by reading, reaching, and discussing with experts from many fields. At a seminar at Mussolini’s former palace on Lake Garda, now the conference center for the University of Milan, I found that process had a name, namely, exaptation. The contrast with adaptation is deliberate. A dinosaur’s feathers evolve over time for warmth or sexual display. That is a linear adaptation; then, we get a nonlinear exaptation for flight. It would not have evolved on its own; it required something to develop for another purpose first. In the same way, the cerebellum adapted over time to do fine-grained manipulation of muscles to allow seeds to be picked for seed pods, but then that capability exapts to allow the sophistication of grammar in language. Art also precedes language in human evolution, allowing limited neuron clusters to handle abstract concepts rather than simply naming things. Human language is a glorious accident, a key knowledge component, but one that delights in ambiguity and meaning change.
So at its best, knowledge management has created a new form of generalists in a world of increasing specialization. That capability goes beyond the simplistic tacit to explicit codification of knowledge that dominates too much practice. But to embrace that capability, we have to develop a capacity to manage inherent, irreducible uncertainty and complexity. That requires a new simplicity and humility of the glories of human evolution, knowledge that can be articulated and communicated, but which allows and enables chance discovery, adductive not inductive reasoning, and the ability to fall into discovery by accident. Mary Midgley, one of the great British philosophers, wrote a wonderful book Science and Poetry, in which she says more about knowledge management and the role of aesthetics in effective knowledge creation than many a dedicated textbook. Then, as to management, well maybe we need to go back to the original meaning of the word. I quote from an article I wrote with Kurtz some years ago:
the English verb “to manage” was originally derived from the Italian maneggiare, meaning to handle and train horses. …the emphasis is on learning with, abiding with, adapting to, respecting, and working with another complex entity: the horse and rider as co-evolving brambles in a wider thicket of social traditions surrounding beauty and form. Around the early 18th century, this original meaning merged with the French term menage, or household, making it easier to adapt the meaning of the combined term manage to the metaphor of the obedient machine, to the corridors of power, and to the actions of controlling and directing.
Thinking of knowledge management as riding a horse is a useful metaphor. Continuing to develop transdisciplinary approaches to the field is vital. Lesley has made a significant contribution to that, and I commend the book and am privileged to have been allowed to write the foreword.
Professor David Snowden
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge
Director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at the Bangor University
The author would like to thank the editors and publishers of the Journal of Knowledge Management Practice and the Journal of Knowledge Management for permission to include in this book some of the material that has appeared in articles written by the author (or as lead author, in one instance). This is specific to:
The author would also like to thank Dr David Longbottom and Richard Self, both of the University of Derby, England, for their encouragement and critical assessment of the source thesis work on which this book is based. Finally, the author thanks Professors David Snowden and Nick Bontis for their support and encouragement over the years in the making of this book.
“Speech is the best show that man puts on.”
(Benjamin Whorf, Language, Mind and Reality, 1942: 171)
It may seem a little odd to start a book about knowledge management with a statement about speech made by the American linguist Benjamin Whorf more than seven decades ago. It will, in the course of the following chapters, come to be seen as a very appropriate starting point for any discussion on this subject.
This book is located within the academic discipline and professional practice of knowledge management (KM). “Knowledge” is a term that can refer to several different, often related concepts. From the KM and organizational perspective, knowledge is generally thought of as an important and valuable commodity, essential to economic success and innovation. It would be hard to argue with this. Similarly, it would seem unreasonable to argue with the idea that knowledge, certainly from the point of view of the organization and most likely from many other points of view, is an accomplishment of people’s interactions with one another. Meetings, for instance, and research activities, presentations at conferences, training sessions, performance appraisal reviews, job interviews, reports, proposals, and just about anything else that you can think of all share a common goal: to do something with knowledge.
KM is concerned with understanding what knowledge is, how to manage it, and how to develop strategies that will successfully leverage the knowledge that resides within any given organization. All sorts of ideas and theories have been developed and tried over the years. And most of these do, it has to be said, emphasize the important role of communications and social interaction in the accomplishment of “knowledge work.” However, relatively few go as far as conceptualizing social interaction as the site of interest in its own right. That is precisely what this book does. In locating organizational knowledge work in social interaction, putting what is referred to as “discourse”—talk and text—front and center as the phenomenon of interest and the object of research, the ultimate aim of this book is not to tell the reader about knowledge work, but to show how knowledge works in real life.
It was stated at the start that the concept of “knowledge” can raise different connotations for different people. Philosophers, for example, have been interested in and debating knowledge for thousands of years. Interestingly, the definition of knowledge as “true, justified belief” that comes down to us from the Greek philosopher and mathematician Plato (427–347 b.c.) can be found in one of KM’s most influential theories. As it turns out, the nature of knowledge is one of the longest and most pervasive debates within the academic field of KM. Largely centered on the question of whether knowledge is a commodity or an object or whether it is a far more complex phenomenon, these debates are not only to be expected in a field that is concerned with its management, but they also underwrite most if not all of the other issues that KM engages with.
The field of KM is immense, contested, complicated, and endlessly evolving. There can be few subjects of practice and academic inquiry that attract such a breadth and scope of theory and points of debate. Moreover, KM theory more often than not draws on other domains such as the science of complexity, social psychology, cognitive psychology, organizational theory, and philosophy, as we noted earlier. It is by any stretch of the imagination something of a mongrel with schizophrenic tendencies in the perception of the equally immense gulf separating KM as a professional practice and KM as a topic for academic research.
Organizations today face challenges from at least three directions. First, they need to adapt to an increasing pace of change and technological development. They operate in demanding, highly competitive, and complex environments and are themselves viewed as complex systems: a recent study of chief executive officers, for instance, identifies as the greatest challenge the gap between organizational readiness and the growth in complexity of the business environment. Second, there are growing concerns over the now ongoing retirement of the “baby boomer” generation, representing a mass exodus from the workplace with all of the knowledge that this generation possesses. Third, they face an explosion in information. As reported in Forbes in 2012, “(S)scientists have worked out exactly how much data is sent to a typical person in the course of a year—the equivalent of every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every single day.”1 Worse, not all of this information can be trusted: IBM predicts that around 80% of corporate data will be “untrustworthy” by 2015. It is not difficult, then, to imagine how important the management of knowledge has become in the organizational world. But these are not the only challenges—KM has challenges that are very specific to its field.
KM’s distinctive challenges come from many directions. In addition to those associated with the nature of knowledge, there are definitional difficulties surrounding the constitution of KM itself. This is seen by some as a major issue with KM described as an ill-defined field that nonetheless makes substantial claims. This is perhaps indicative of its diverse origins and tendency to dip into other disciplines for ideas and perhaps even substance. (As a small aside, the latter comment is not meant as a criticism because, as subsequent chapters will show, I do exactly the same myself!) Some go so far as to question how such a “poorly executed” field, with alleged low rates of reported success, can survive in the modern corporate world.
In fact, the challenges and debates on KM’s alleged high failure rates remain very topical indeed despite what is described as KM’s thriving literature of practice, research, and theory. This latter, theory, is itself held up as an issue. For instance, there are too many theories in KM according to one perspective, while another sees the absence of a unifying theory on the near horizon as one of the greatest challenges for KM, its theorists, scholars, and practitioners. In terms of challenges, this is the merest tip of the iceberg. As a small preview of what is to come, other challenges center around the role of technology in KM, the effects of cultural differences, the question over ethics, as well as those around how to foster effective knowledge creating and sharing. These are just some of the topics covered in the following chapters. Nonetheless, it is these characteristics that make the field of KM a fascinating topic of study that never fails to surprise.
The spotlight on KM theory reveals, at first sight, a somewhat chaotic landscape. To bring some order, a substantial sampling of KM theory is organized on two bisecting continua: those with a focus on the organization versus those concerned with personal knowledge and those that reify knowledge as an object versus those that perceive knowledge as or embedded within social action. This “taxonomy” of KM theory is introduced later in the book, and it is hoped this will be seen as a useful roadmap to what is otherwise a complicated and tangled enterprise.
Undoubtedly, the theory that has had the greatest impact and influence is Professor Ikujiro Nonaka’s theory of the knowledge-creating firm and its various evolutions since its first publication in the early 1990s. This conceptualizes knowledge as consisting of two types—tacit and explicit—and describes the organizational transactions by which one can be converted to the other as the prerequisite to the generation of new knowledge. The promotion of the benefits of converting knowledge from one type to the other raises a minefield of debate and challenge all on its own. Yet despite coming in for considerable criticism, as will be shown in subsequent chapters, this framework remains the most influential, contentious, and most unproblematically adopted.
The “competition” to this influential theory comes in the shape of those theories that are classified as approaching knowledge as or embedded in social action, and which include the “knowing how–knowing that” formulation promoted by, among others, Paul Duguid. This particular perspective approaches knowledge as comprising two principle elements which are fundamentally prerequisite one to the other: “knowing how” (equivalent to tacit knowledge) makes “knowing that” (equated to explicit knowledge) actionable. This proves to have particular significance and salience for the ideas investigated and developed in this book.
In spite of all these debates, there is one aspect of KM about which most if not all practitioners, theorists, and researchers agree on, and that is that knowledge is a prime—if not the prime—resource of the modern organization.
Clearly, any view of the nature of knowledge has profound consequence for KM theory and its practice, research methods, and so on. Nonaka is credited as being the first to introduce the dualist concept of tacit–explicit knowledge to KM in the 1990s, and the trace of this can be seen in the majority of its theories. Beyond the field of KM, however, the tacit–explicit formulation of knowledge appears much earlier. In social psychology, for example, the role of tacit knowledge in intellectual competence makes an appearance in the mid-1980s. The tacit–explicit distinction is reputed to have been initially introduced to the management literature in the early 1980s. Tacit knowledge, as the product of implicit learning, appears even earlier in the cognitive psychology field, starting in the mid-1960s.
Nonaka specifically draws these terms from the work of the philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi who was working from the 1950s onward. This would turn out to be one of the most significant moves in the developing field of KM because, for whatever reason, the result was that almost every writer (the present one not excepted) and theorist and probably many practitioners too started to not only refer to Nonaka’s work but also to that of Polanyi. The interpretation of Polanyi’s work, in particular, has become something of a subtopic in KM, as evidenced in a growing literature devoted solely to this purpose. For these reasons, the reader will notice that when referring to Polanyi’s work here, his own words are frequently quoted.
A competing view of knowledge to that promoted by Nonaka is also very much in evidence in the field as noted earlier, although because it is highly fragmented in terms of its source and variation on its theme, it does not appear to be a coherent perspective on first inspection. This view approaches knowledge as a phenomenon (practice, accomplishment, action, behavior, and so on) either as embedded in or as constituting social interaction. This view particularly emphasizes the importance of language and communications in doing knowledge work. This is the view of knowledge that is developed throughout this book, aligning with a constructionist theory of knowledge as action constructed and accomplished in discourse—hence the relevance of Whorf’s statement at the outset of these discussions.
What this brief survey indicates is that knowledge is important to organizational well-being, development, and success. It logically follows, then, that harnessing this phenomenon by controlling, leveraging, and applying it will enhance an organization’s opportunities to achieve its objectives. But while one can argue that the management of organizational knowledge is more than a passing fad, there is a question over the extent to which knowledge can be harnessed to any degree of predictable effect when the phenomenon is neither well understood nor comprehensively specified.
As we touched on earlier, many KM theorists, researchers, and practitioners agree that knowledge work is largely accomplished in social interaction, but few if any have located theory, research, or practice in discourse itself. The work reported here concludes that discursive psychology can provide both the theoretical framework and research methodology for an approach to organizational knowledge work. This effectively extends the directions that many in the KM field are already indicating and have been since the early 1990s.
From the perspective of discursive psychology, knowledge is not an object to be captured, codified, stored, and passed around. Rather, knowledge is an accomplishment of social interaction with others: knowledge is constructed and shared in talk and text in interaction. A research focus drawing on this particular paradigm directs the inquiry to how knowledge work is done in talk interaction and with what consequences. To make such a proposition relevant and of pragmatic use to the field of KM and its practice, the present research reaches into the academic field of implicit learning (cognitive psychology) for an explanation of tacit knowledge, reasoning that tacit knowing (“knowing how”) in action is precisely what this type of research analysis reveals. An important distinction to draw concerns the dualist version of knowledge mentioned earlier and the view of knowledge expressed here. In referring to “tacit knowing” and “knowing how,” and all other versions thereof, it should not be inferred that we are erecting a line of demarcation between these and explicit knowledge. Knowledge is approached here as a holistic concept comprising both tacit (know how) and explicit (know that) fragments, with the sum of both constituting knowledge.
The research and analysis reported here focus on organizational knowledge sharing actions in the context of everyday interactions. Knowledge sharing is arguably one of the most fundamental, complex, and problematic topics on KM’s agenda. Drawing on KM research and theory, four thematic categories of knowledge sharing are identified, which form the target of our analysis: identity, trust, risk, and context. What the findings show is that not only are these four themes present in the data, as linguistically constructed by speakers and (discussion forum) contributors, they are also corelational and influencing on the scope and directions of knowledge sharing actions. A key conclusion is that trust, risk, and identity are themselves contextual phenomena invoked in knowledge sharing actions. This is shown to be corroborated when the analytic focus investigates what contexts per se speakers invoke in their knowledge sharing discourse, finding these three principal contextual phenomena are shown to be present. In short, a principal argument made is that the present investigations and their findings provide empirical support for those who support the “knowing how–knowing that” formulation in the practice of KM, in particular the influential properties of knowing how on the actions of sharing knowledge.
The book is divided into two parts: Part One reports a comprehensive and critical review of the field of KM and two other fields that are shown to be relevant: discourse analysis, with the emphasis on discursive psychology, and implicit learning drawing on the field of cognitive psychology. Part Two presents the analysis and findings from the primary research drawing on discursive psychology.
The first chapter investigates the nature of knowledge as described and debated in the KM and other relevant literatures, which sets the groundwork for what follows. Chapter 2 turns the attention onto KM itself and its origins and multiple perspectives with the implication of limitless boundaries. In particular, we consider the influence of technology as a key “push factor” in the interest, development, and take-up of KM. Other relevant questions such as whether knowledge should be managed at all from an ethical perspective are also addressed. Chapter 3 investigates other leading and current themes and debates in the KM literature such as determining KM’s success or failure and the problem of measurement, arguing that these are largely rooted in the troubles over the definition of knowledge. Special attention is given to the topic of knowledge sharing, finding a number of factors proposed in the KM literature to be significant and influential in these types of organizational activities. In the following chapter, the taxonomy of KM theory reveals a sharply divided field, but one that is dominated by one single paradigm.
Proceeding from there, Chapter 5 introduces an alternative way of approaching knowledge from the perspective of social constructionism. Developing on these themes and ideas, Chapter 6 explores discourse analysis as a research methodology, with a very particular perspective on the traditional scientific method. The focus is on discursive psychology and how this and other discourse analysis paradigms have made significant contributions to our understanding in a number of topics. Three of these—identity, gender, and computer-mediated communications—are singled out for detailed reviews of research and their findings.
Chapters 7 and 8 move the investigations into the field of cognitive psychology and implicit learning theory in pursuit of a more robust understanding of tacit knowledge. A comparison between perspectives finds considerable correspondence between those of KM and those drawn from implicit learning. What we gain is a clearer notion of the “tacit” and empirical evidence for tacit knowing as an influencing factor in human action. This is followed by a more detailed consideration of what have been identified as the four thematic categories of knowledge sharing. A brief summary and set of conclusions round off Part One.
The first major chapter in Part Two is a detailed and thorough discussion of research methodology, giving particular attention to the methodology adopted in the present research. The subsequent five chapters each report in detail the analysis and findings of original research topicalized on each of the four knowledge sharing thematic categories (“identity” is split across two chapters). The final chapter brings all of these findings together in a detailed discussion framed around the research questions, subsequently linking these findings to the debates and issues in KM raised in the earlier parts of the book.
Does this change anything? What is to be hoped is that the discussion, arguments, and evidence in the following chapters lead to a firmly grasped recognition of the advantages and insights to be gained in understanding the organization as a “knowledge system” in which the real action takes place at a far deeper and more fundamental level—discourse. From the outset, it is made clear that what we are about is simply extending directions in which many in the KM field are already indicating—and that is a view worth seeing.