Starting to find some footing

Now that we’re halfway through the semester, and halfway through the reading list, I’ve begun to feel that I have my footing. The ground isn’t constantly shifting beneath me, and I can see the outlines of the landscape. Some themes are beginning to emerge: the relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge; information sharing, trust, information creation, and the social dimensions of organizations; the role and significance of codification and codebooks; and of course, epistemology itself, and the relationship between knowledge, process, and action (henceforth, I’m ignoring JTB in favor of Nonaka’s definition of knowledge as justified belief that enhances one’s ability to take action). It was with these emerging broad themes in mind that I chose this week’s reading: Nahapiet & Ghoshal’s “Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage,” Powell & Snellman’s “The knowledge economy,” and Tremblay’s “The information society: From Fordism to Gatesism.” Why these? Because the broad themes emerging all point to knowledge creation and management as an organic, social process, one knotted up in the intricacies of living and being in a society (however broadly or narrowly one wants to define society, be it at the enterprise level, nation-state level, or even global level). These articles seemed like they could be helpful in understanding KM from that perspective. (On a somewhat tangential note: I’ve been avoiding the research articles because, frankly, both of my graduate degrees have been professional degrees (law and LIS), and have next to no methodological training…therefore, I feel inadequately qualified to really sift through those articles critically).

Nahapiel & Ghoshal’s theory of social capital, in all three of its dimension, facilitating the creation and exchange of knowledge and, therefore, providing advantage to organizations (they use the technical term “firms”) who support and develop social capital actually made me think of my favorite management book, Leadership is an Art, by Max Dupree. (I know, I know, who has a favorite management book? Stay with me here). Dupree believed in servant-leadership; one leads by creating trust and empowering one’s people to contribute to the shared vision and success of the organization. In other words, by fostering a community of practice! (I wouldn’t have made the leap to Hara on my own, btw – credit goes to my own community of practice, and specifically, Melinda’s discussion of the decentralization of power). The relational embeddedness of social capital, in particular, explains why it’s so difficult for autistic people – even brilliant, well-trained ones – to become part of a firm, and to really contribute to knowledge creation in the manner that their cognitive ability would suggest – because of the social contradictions at play. And of course, Polanyi, tacitness, and epistemology come in for an appearance in the requisite, “But what is knowledge?” section.

In the context of my other readings, I found myself in the mood to argue with Powell & Snellman from the word “Abstract.” Their contention that Nonaka and Drucker are narrowly managerial in orientation seems laughable, given the revolutionary role of both writers in our conception of both knowledge management and the information society (Drucker, after all, is the one who coined the term “knowledge worker”). And their general conception of what constitutes “knowledge” and their means of orienting their evidence of of a knowledge economy towards the empirical (patent counting) falls into the same shallow thinking as Rule & Besen identified in Porat. Those who would describe the Fordist era of manufacturing as purely mechanized betray their lack of familiarity with the knowledge and skill required of the machinist and machine operator; this author would argue that the shift toward the computerized factory is not a shift towards knowledge, but merely towards the codification of knowledge such that the computer can now do what the skilled machinist did. Also, I have  enough friends who do IP work to have zero faith that an increase in patents is a reflection of anything in terms of knowledge; it’s as much a cynical business tool as anything else (seriously, patent counting as a tool seems to me a reflection of a poor understanding of how patents work).

So, a little bit wary from Powell and Snellman’s failure to understand the significant role of tacit knowledge in the Fordist manufacturing era, we now approach Tremblay’s work, which is explicitly about “Fordism to Gatesism.” Onto this trepidation is the inclusion of the term “information society,” which, as I discussed previously, Rule & Besen ripped apart. So I went into this work struggling to keep an open mind; but, Tremblay expanded it to a book in 2001, so there’s that, right? I was, however, happily surprised; rather than triumphantly trumpeting the industrial society or Gatesism, Tremblay takes a scathing look at the information society as capitalism writ large, “the commodification of information, culture, and communication.” I particularly enjoyed Tremblay’s exposition of the tacit knowledge of the communications field that make objective evaluation of “the information society” (such as the Innisiation postulate) and which undergirds the optimist/pessimist dichotomy. For those struggling with the concept of tacit knowledge, this bit of exposition illustrates nicely what tacit knowledge looks like at play. What Tremblay does a wonderful job of in this article is nailing down the “lovely naievete” of those in the optimist camp; the fundamental information society belief seems to be, truly, that access to enough information will change human nature! No more rapacious capitalists! No more dumb choices! Information and communication will transform us all! Tremblay puts words to the cynicism I’ve felt throughout: “the computerization of society, a transformation process currently underway, is not necessarily tantamount to the information society, a utopian model of society, the realization of which is more than unlikely.” 

 

Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. The Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/259373

Powell, W. W., & Snellman, Kaisa. (2004). The knowledge economy. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 199-220. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.100037

Tremblay, G. (1995).. Canadian Journal of Communication, 20(4), 461-482. URL:
http://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/891/797