How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

We may not be able to make you love reading, but archaeology of knowledge will lead you to love reading starting from now. Book is the window to open the new world. The world that you want is in the better stage and level. World will always guide you to even the prestige stage of the life. You know, this is some of how reading will give you the kindness. In this case, more books you read more knowledge you know, but it can mean also the bore is full.

The archaeology of knowledge

Knowledge Management

Diversity and mobility in education and work present a paramount challenge that needs better conceptualization in educational theory. This challenge has been addressed by educational scholars with the notion of boundaries, particularly by the concepts of boundary crossing and boundary objects. Although studies on boundary crossing and boundary objects emphasize that boundaries carry learning potential, it is not explicated in what way they do so. By reviewing this literature, this article offers an understanding of boundaries as dialogical phenomena. The review of the literature reveals four potential learning mechanisms that can take place at boundaries: identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation. These mechanisms show various ways in which sociocultural differences and resulting discontinuities in action and interaction can come to function as resources for development of intersecting identities and practices.

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Boundary Crossing and Boundary Objects

by GABRIELLA EICHINGER FERRO-LUZZI via Mario Fascetti, 67, 00136 Rome, Italy. 24 ix 81 Cohen (CA 22:201-18) and all his commentators take it for granted that we know the mechanism of biological evolution. For him \"the basic mechanism, change resulting from reproductive success, is clear\" (p. 204), and commentator Swartz does not even want to speak of the theory of evolution because the \"facts are empirically established\" (p. 214). I think we have to distinguish between biological evolution and the explanation thereof. Biological evolution is a fact; general directional change towards greater complexity of organisms and, above all, towards greater complexity of the brain cannot be denied. Theory as to the mechanism of evolution, however, leaves much to be desired. Breeding success might at most be adduced to explain the survival of the species; it can never explain directional change unless we simultaneously assume that species become progressively fitter and hence survive longer, which is not borne out by paleontology. We have as a species little hope of matching the longevity of the scorpion, and the tortoise beats us in the longevity of the individual and the species. If reproductive success and the survival of the species were selected for, we would do well to return at least to the level of the rat, but unfortunately the general direction of evolution seems to be set once and for all, even if it means producing less and less viable species. Within the general direction of evolution, transient \"fashions\" are discernible, and these too cannot be explained in terms of fitness. After a long period in which the \"nude look\" was \"in,\" fur coats became fashionable, eventually to give way to another wave of nudism. At present ancient nudists, fur-clad beauties, and modern nudists may be found inhabiting the same environment, and therefore the appearance of the outermost layer of the body obviously cannot be said to possess survival or reproductive value. Also, Homo sapiens is evolving. We are getting taller, and our eyes and teeth are getting weaker. None of these changes has any influence on reproduction, and the latter two, at least, do not make us fitter. What could be better proof of the theory of selection through reproductive success than evolution towards a longer period of fertility? This is happening now, but the extra years the Western woman has gained at the beginning and end of her fertile period are not used for reproduction. I have recently pointed out (1980:247-56) the utter implausibility of all attempts to explain continued lactase activity throughout life by reference to survival and reproductive advantages. If, for instance, the Danes, who are among the best lactose absorbers in the world, had acquired this trait through selection for fitness, they would have to have lived for thousands of years in such precarious nutritional conditions that drinking or not drinking fresh milk made a difference to their survival and reproduction, which is obviously absurd; In my view, the Darwinian paradigm has lulled us into the false security of having found the answer to the evolutionary problem and thus prevented us from searching for internal mechanisms setting the evolutionary switches. One such switch seems to indicate the overall direction, others lead to temporary fashions, and still others, possibly, determine the life-spans of species. Change toward a drier climate may have been fatal for the Brontosaurus but was hardly so for the Ichthyosaurus, which probably died of old age after an enviably long lifetime as a species. If, as I hold, biological evolution is a fact but its mechanism totally unknown, the application of the evolutionary model to culture naturally becomes problematic. On this point, however, several reservations have been voiced by the commentators, and Cohen himself rightly insists that \"prediction of the future is impossible for human events\"; therefore I can limit myself to a few points. I suggest that we speak not of the evolution of culture as an omnibus category but of that of particular aspects of culture. Evolution in the direction of greater complexity and efficiency is clearly at work in technology. Number also imposes some constraints, and the state could develop only after the tribal band. This is about all, however, that can be said with certainty of cultural evolution; speculations about the evolution of family types, systems of reckoning descent, ways of thinking, and so forth I hold to be vain. Small autonomous villages in Africa may well have developed into a kingdom according to the sequence Cohen describes, but the postulate of \"selective factors\" implies that there was some kind of necessity at work, which, being concluded post hoc, can never be proven. Cohen cites a few options, it is true, but the very concept of \"pressure on the leaders to specialize\" so that they eventually transformed themselves into monarchs is questionable. If disputes had really been crucial, these could just as well have been settled by councils of elders or the like. In India, for instance, disputes have been very effectively settled by village and caste councils with or without the existence of monarchy, and Westerners have long been accustomed to consult lawyers. It is true that there have been \"attempts to create a basis for world order,\" but I would not conclude from these that there is an evolutionary trend in that direction. Attempts at world order (in the form of world domination) have repeatedly been made in the past; it is only that the known world, or the world that counted, was smaller then. Even if the existing states could be brought to abdicate voluntarily, a world government replacing them would be 'rather impracticable. Our minds have an innate tendency (only a tendency, not a necessity) to prefer unity to plurality, and attempts to create bigger states and international organizations participate in this tendency, which has little to do with the rational evaluation of advantages and disadvantages. Since smaller entities, however, are easier to administer, it is quite conceivable that some of the bigger existing states will shrink, judging from the diffusion of separatist movements all over the world. A parallel to this situation may be drawn in the economic field. There has been a tendency to create bigger and bigger industrial complexes, but it is unlikely that this tendency will continue. In Italy the big firms are in trouble, while family enterprises flourish. Similarly, the supermarket, which according to some prophets should long since have ousted the small shops, has not been able to do so, at least in Europe. I am glad that Cohen does not simplistically extend \"biological theory into sociocultural realms\" as some of his commentators are prone to, but the postulate that similar abstract principles govern \"the evolution of all things-inorganic, organic, and sociocultural\"-seems to be inspired more by the above-mentioned monistic tendency of our minds than by the observation of facts.

On Evolutionary Epistemology

Knowledge management has emerged as an important field for practice and research in information systems. This field is building on theoretical foundations from information economics, strategic management, organizational culture, organizational behavior, organizational structure, artificial intelligence, quality management, and organizational performance measurement. These theories are being used as foundations for new concepts that provide a rationale for managing knowledge, define the process of managing knowledge, and enable us to evaluate the results of this process. Based on articles published between 1995 and 2005, new concepts are emerging, including knowledge economy, knowledge alliance, knowledge culture, knowledge organization, knowledge infrastructure, and knowledge equity. An analysis of the theoretical foundations of knowledge management reveals a healthy arena with a strong foundation and clear directions for future work.

The theoretical foundations of knowledge management

To derive more business value from existing organizational knowledge, many organizations seek to rely on strategically aligned knowledge management systems (KMS). However, as documented in prior studies, they often underestimate the challenges about social interactions and users' perceptions in response to new information systems. Based on an interpretive case study, this paper examines the implementation of a KMS to show how social representations of four groups of users resulted in the misalignment of the KMS with the organizational strategy. The social representation lens allows us to interpret strategic alignment in terms of dynamic processes of anchoring and objectification that aid individuals and groups to make sense of KMS initiatives. The groups studied developed different cognitive views of the KMS that ultimately led to a strategic misalignment. The key implication is that social interactions within and among groups shape KMS alignment with organizational strategy, thus elucidating the nature o...

Strategic Alignment and Misalignment of Knowledge Management Systems: A Social Representation Perspective

The paper critically examines knowledge ownership when personal or organizational knowledge is transferred between individuals or between individuals and organizations. Employing a form of discourse analysis, we analyse the data from three complementary perspectives (international treaties and conventions on privacy and intellectual property, employment and merchant account contracts, and verdicts from knowledge-related legal cases) to unveil the conflicts between privacy and property rights. The results show a dialectical view where ownership shifts between the individual and the organization/community and therefore, the individual may or may not necessarily own what he knows. Privacy and property have been central issues in computational ethics for more than two decades. The use of information systems for strategic purposes offers new challenges for these established ethical concepts. Knowledge is not only a form of property governed by intellectual property law; it is also an individual attribute and, as part of the personality, it may be governed by privacy law. As a result, the dialectical view also shows that the ownership shift between the individual and the organization/community means that the organization may or may not necessarily own what it knows.

Conflicts between privacy and property: The discourse in personal and organizational knowledge

Closely related to organizational learning, knowledge creation, knowledge codification, and knowledge reuse, knowledge transfers of tacit knowledge between individuals and conversions of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge raise important issues regarding the use of ethics and self-interest as counter determinants. Do organizations "own" the knowledge of their employees, or is this knowledge an "attribute" of an autonomous individual and subject to protection under human rights to privacy or security-of-person? This paper explores these opposite viewpoints from the perspectives of knowledge management and human rights. Consequently, organizational knowledge may fall under the intellectual property theory and organizations have the right to buy, sell and use their corporate knowledge as it suits their needs, while personal knowledge may fall under the personal privacy theory and individuals have the right to protect the security of their personal knowledge. Thus, knowledge management practices may differ with regard to the two types of knowledge.

Alina Dulipovici

Papers

The theoretical foundations of knowledge management

Strategic Alignment and Misalignment of Knowledge Management Systems: A Social Representation Perspective

Conflicts between privacy and property: The discourse in personal and organizational knowledge

The Ethics of Knowledge Transfers and Conversions: Property or Privacy Rights?

Reconceptualizing trust