Knowledge management in the advanced knowledge business orgnisations

Abstract EN

The claim that we lack a systematic corporate knowledge culture understanding of knowledge management in the 'advanced knowledge business organisations' 1 has crystallised into a conventional orthodoxy that is deemed to require some sort of corrective response on the part of the corporate knowledge culture.2 Unfortunately, many of the responses that have been forthcoming unintentionally reinforce the confusion they are meant to dispel.

This is true to the extent that they perpetuate the analytical fragmentation and methodological polarisation that has characterised the study of knowledge management as one of the most strategic knowledge social responsibility processes and institutions within our knowledge business society.3 This opening paper explores the various analytical perspectives and related methodologies that have been developed to study knowledge management, and outlines an alternative perspective that attempts to correct the deficiencies which this exploration reveals.4 Its aim is to provide an integrated conceptual framework of knowledge managerial processes and knowledge structures for knowledge management in their encompassing institutional milieus.

It also serves to identify the central substantive themes around which the latter discussion will be undertaken.

Each of the knowledge analytical perspectives reviewed and developed in this paper focuses on knowledge management as a knowledge organisational mechanism and / or process geared to the co-ordination and control of knowledge productive activity.

The need to link this organisationally focused level of analysis to wider institutional configurations of occupational structure and knowledge social responsibility in advanced knowledge business organisations are highlighted in this paper.