It’s all academic, anyways…

So, hot off my foray into disasters, and the depressing conclusion that we can never be prepared, because in a constantly evolving situation, everything relies on the tacit knowledge of the individuals or community making the decisions, I headed in the world of knowledge management and academic libraries. In particular, I went into this reading curious to see the role of trust, community assumptions and worldviews (talk about shared assumptions of validity – do you get more specific on that front than in the academy) and the role of tacit knowledge in informing our ideas of truth and objectivity.  Although it doesn’t deal with these articles, I was also thinking of Whitney’s comments on the distance between pedagogy and practice (seriously, though, Whitney, you WEREN’T BORN when Challenger exploded??? *goes to the old person corner of shame*) So, around the general theme of academic libraries, I chose:

Gandhi, S. (2004). Knowledge management and reference services. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30(5), 368-381.

Jantz, R. (2001) Knowledge management in academic libraries: Special tools and processes to support information professionals. Reference Services Review, 29(1), 33 – 39.

Blackler, F. (1995). Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: An overview and interpretation. Organization Studies, 16(6), 1021 – 1046.

Townley, C.T. (2001). Knowledge management and academic libraries. College and Research Libraries, 62(1), 44 – 55.

Interestingly, the initial premise of the Townley article seems outdated, perhaps speaking to the penetration of knowledge management: “librar­ies do not consider organizational knowledge as a resource in its own right as they do personnel, collections, or facilities.” Even in 603, issues of organizational knowledge and competitive advantage were addressed, and a number of the academic librarian positions I’ve seen posted of late emphasize skills in data analytics, presumably to capitalize on explicit organizational knowledge (I know SAS if anyone’s looking…). The contemporary Jantz article, while not addressing the KM tradition explicitly, is nonetheless based on trying to codify some tacit knowledge of librarians into the Common Knowledge Database. And a mere three years after Townley states that libraries aren’t using organizational knowledge, Gandhi sees that “KM [has] become visible on the radar screens of libraries.” The Blackler article, perhaps because it is not situated within the academic library milieu directly, offers a more developed and sophisticated view of organizational knowledge as a culturally-located, active process (Want to guess which article I prefer?).

AT this point, Townley, in particular, felt largely like more of the same. The same themes that we’ve seen throughout – KM as a means to gain competitive advantage, respond to increasing environmental turbulence, and to encourage knowledge creation and sharing in an atmosphere of trust – appear again here. While the application of KM principles to expand the role of the academic librarian within the institution is novel and could be well worth the effort, although I believe Townley skips over the intense amount of tacit knowledge that is required to be a successful leader, change maker, and coordinator, as such an expanded role would require. His discussion about proactivity and the conflict between KM principles and traditional librarian principles of confidentiality is interesting, but, given our ability anonymize data, I believe history has come down on the side of KM. Jantz, on the other hand, seemed like an extremely local attempt without clear guiding principles (I would be curious to know if the CKDB has survived). Which leaves us with Gandhi and Blackler.

Like Melinda, I liked Gandhi’s definition of KM as “organizing to know” (although, as I learned from my paper, it’s specifically organizing to know within organizations; at the individual level, it’s information seeking). Although, unlike Melinda, I wasn’t really taken with Gandhi’s description of the information continuum; for me, it was more like, “Seriously? The data pyramid AGAIN?” (But perhaps that reaction is from studying it in 600, 601, AND 602 last semester). I do like Gandhi’s framework of knowledge, management, IT, and culture. The example of employees withholding information when they feel that management withholds from them reminded me all too much of my time in the corporate world, and also underscored the issues of trust and that trust is created when we share knowledge…it all keeps coming back around in beautiful tacit circles 😉 Having been a database admin once upon a time, I enjoyed her discussion of DBMS and the fact that, yes, they are in fact still just information management systems (and, imho, will remain so until we can codify tacit knowledge to the point that we can give information semantic meaning for computers…at which point, I welcome our new robot overlords). And I absolutely agree with Gandhi’s ultimate conclusion that the future of librarianship – if we are to have a future – lies in moving beyond mere administration, and embracing our role as specialist knowledge managers.

So, all of this brings me to Blackler. We all know my biases by now. I’m deeply cynical about the post-industrial society (much less the information society) and structural inequality. I doubt the very existence of such a thing as “objectivity” or “truth,” and believe that all information is culturally mediated and preloaded with the biases and world view of the person sharing it. I’m disillusioned with the professions, and have read just enough Lacan to be dangerous. (Look, Ma, I’m a postmodernist!) So of course I loved Blackler. He shares my biases and concludes, I believe quite rightly, that there’s no such thing as “knowledge” floating out there in the ether. There is knowing, which is a mediated, situated, provisional, pragmatic, and contested process and interaction. While it’s not a novel formulation (Bourdieu’s doxa, for example, address largely the same issues), it provides an almost entirely novel way of looking at questions of knowledge management in a capitalist system. AS Blackler puts it, “The question thus becomes: ‘How are system of knowing and doing changing, and what responses would be appropriate?'” Dynamite stuff, really.