A sense of place

My initial notes for this post’s themes included “location,” “community,” and “who we are/where we are.” They’re broad themes, but, building on Blackler, draw upon the sense that our knowing is socially and culturally mediated; any community of practice, as an epistemological community, has a sense of place to its identity, even if that place isn’t physical. So, along the theme of “place,” I chose:

Stock, W.G. (2011). Informational cities: Analysis and construction of cities in the knowledge society. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 62(5), 963-986. (For the record, I know I used Castell’s work that this is built on in a recent paper, and I can’t recall which – it’s driving me batty).

Goggins, S.P., & Mascaro, C. (2013). Context matters: The experience of physical, informational, and cultural distance in rural IT firm. The Information Society, 29, 113-127.

Lam, W., & Chua, A.Y. (2009). Knowledge outsourcing: An alternative strategy for knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(3), 28 – 43.

Stock’s article struck me as depressingly true (despite utilizing the gag-worth term “glocality’). I currently live in a highly gentrified suburb of Vancouver, BC – but the economic interactions of my current hometown make it much more part of Hong Kong/Beijing than anywhere in North America (and the fact that I speak neither Mandarin nor Cantonese very much leaves me out of the economic life here). Interestingly, many people’s economic lives remain centered around that world city, probably because, as Stock asserts, the center of information is there – my hometown is largely a resort, a place to park assets and live when not working; the real economic and knowledge development is still happening in Hong Kong and Beijing. I was happy to see Stock address gentrification; when I first started reading about “space of flows,” I was screaming in my head: “But these informational cities will displace those who’ve been left out of the information economy!” So, I was relieved to see Stock address that, as opposed to cheerily embracing information society idealism. The discussion of job and income polarization, the social consequences thereof, and the Matthew principle are all useful (I see those U- and J-shaped curves with foreign labor all the time). I had a harder time locating this article within KM, but I suppose it epitomizes it in a sense – organizations (in this sense, the corporations and universities that make up the knowledge nexus of an informational city) that capitalize upon their knowledge will gain (and perpetuate) their advantage in a way that makes increasingly rigid differentiation between knowledge winners and losers.

Stock dovetails nicely with the Goggins & Mascaro piece; whereas Stock largely examines the characteristics of cities that have successfully transitioned into being “informational cities,” Goggins & Mascaro examine the experience of a rural IT firm and the impact of different forms of distance, including cultural distance (although they’re addressing the difference between digital natives and non-natives, as opposed to the cultural differences in substantial immigrant populations) and informational distance. Goggins & Mascaro’s research largely bears out  Stock’s work: STC had trouble recruiting the kinds of knowledge workers that ITC firms typically employ, because the educational level of its rural recruits was typically much lower than one would find in an informational city. STC overcomes this through a 12 week bootcamp on hire, but throughout, we find STC is having to overcome the informational distance imposed by their geographical distance, and the agglomeration and spillover benefits that make informational cities such founts of innovation and economic growth just aren’t present in the rural areas.

Finally, Lam & Chua’s work on knowledge outsourcing (KO) took me back to Chua’s work on disaster management (hey, if you find a publishable theoretical model, ride that pony to the finish!): once again, we find the process-oriented model of knowledge creation, knowledge reuse, and knowledge transfer. Same story, different context (since, really, context is what it’s all about). Unsurprisingly, relationships are, again, at the heart of the KM venture, even in a KO situation. And it’s this author’s opinion that relationship is the real heart of the informational city, and of the success and failure of KM in almost every circumstance, because, ultimately, it’s about trust and tacit knowledge. The example that sprang to my mind was Lean Manufacturing, even though it seems about as far as you can get from FU’s courseware outsourcing. With Lean Manufacturing, in order to preserve value and eliminate waste, the Lean professional has to develop deep knowledge of what constitutes value, and therefore what constitutes waste, to the client – it’s a KO relationship that requires the consultant to develop intense tacit knowledge of the client business.