Achieving Organizational Independence of Employees' Knowledge Using Knowledge Management, Organizational Learning, and the Learning Organization

Introduction

We are said to live in a ‘knowledge society’. If this is true, it would mean, among other things, that individuals and their subjective knowledge are becoming more important at the expense of machines and other so called ‘resources’. Droege and Hoobler recently (2003: 50) described one of the problems of the ‘knowledge economy’ stating that employees’ knowledge ‘is rarely shared, swapped, traced, and fertilized to ensure that it remains, at least in part, with the firm when employees leave’.

There are, however, ways for organizations to become more or less independent of any one individual and her or his subjective knowledge. The aim of this chapter is to identify and draw attention to such means, which are sometimes obvious but often quite subtle, in the following management ideas concerning knowledge and/or learning in an organizational context: organizational learning, the learning organization, and knowledge management. I have analysed literature on these ideas in order to highlight and ‘unveil’ means enabling organizations to become independent of the individual’s subjective knowledge.

Organizations interfere a lot in every single person’s life; Deetz (1992) has even claimed that organizations ‘colonize’ us and our world – we grow up in organizations (child care centres, schools, etc.), we shop in them, we work there, etc. They can easily – like giants – in one way or another destroy the originality of the only thing that makes individuals unique on the labour market: subjective knowledge. There is always a risk that all knowledge will stay within, or be transferred to, organizations. The employees – and especially their subjective knowledge – run the risk of being exploited. Therefore, it is so important to unveil all the means enabling employers to become independent of the individual’s subjective knowledge, for instance in popular management ideas, which this chapter is about.

Most of the management literature generally seems to view the struggle to become independent of subjective knowledge as risk reduction, if it is acknowledged at all. From such a functionalistic perspective, independence struggles are thus a necessity that organizations – and in particular employers – would not be able to cope without. For instance, Bonora and Revang (1993) discussed strategies for reducing firms’ dependence on subjective knowledge, by building knowledge into the organization and by building exit barriers. Clegg argued that:

Stovel and Bontis (2002: 310) argued that ‘senior managers must implement knowledge management strategies to ensure that monies they have spent on the training and operation of departments are not wasted when voluntary turnover occurs within the firm’.

I will instead view the means enabling organizations to become independent of subjective knowledge from a more critical perspective, thus following in the footsteps of pioneers such as Braverman (1974), and view them as concrete tools for gaining control over knowledge. From such a critical perspective, current and more hidden means of controlling knowledge are hardly signs of a new trend, rather they are extensions of earlier ways of controlling knowledge, such as slavery, where the workforce was (and at some places in the world still is) owned, and Taylorism, where the employees are alienated from knowledge of the whole product/service and are only allowed to learn and master narrow, specialised work tasks, which could also be expressed in terms of control by deskilling the employees (Braverman, 1974). I see it as a continuous struggle between organizations on the one hand, mainly represented by the employers, trying to remain or become independent, and on the other, the individual’s (which, of course, in some cases might at the same time represent an employer) struggle not to become redundant. Both the organization and the individuals have their passions for knowledge, or should I say possessions for knowledge. In this chapter, however, the conflict in focus is that between the organization and the individual. I will, however, assume that employers are more interested in organizational independence than employees are. Consequently, the conflict at stake is also that between employers and employees.