A review of knowledge management (KM) literature shows a proliferation of publications in the last 10 years. The debate on what ‘knowledge’ is (and how to manage ‘knowledge’) has been intense and often contradictory. The confusion in this new, emergent field is created by a variety of ontological and epistemological assumptions. In this section, we will review KM literature which explicitly addresses philosophical assumptions and have informed KM practices.
In early 1990s, since Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) introduce the concept of ‘tacit’ (i.e. knowledge in a person’s head which has a personal quality and is hard to formalize and communicate) and ‘explicit’ knowledge (i.e. knowledge that is transmittable in formal, systematic language), scholar and practitioners have find ways to turn tacit knowledge into explicit. Knowledge is used interchangeably with ‘information’ and is managed as ‘something which can be written down or codified’ (Sutton, 2001). Knowledge is seen as objects which can be managed independent of the users or the recipients of the knowledge. The value of knowledge can be objectively assigned by experts according to a set of objective criteria.
This understanding of knowledge as objects has profound impact on the design of first generation KM practices which include:
Making ‘tacit’ knowledge explicit by investing in KM systems or global best practice databases which 'capture' the knowledge of experts. The 'capture' approach continued with an emphasis on capturing, storing, retrieving knowledge in databases, manuals, books and reports, and then sharing it in a hard form (Hildreth and Kimble, 2002).
Measuring the benefits and bottom-line outcomes of knowledge capturing and transfer activities, assuming that ‘codified’ knowledge will have a linear impact on firms’ operations. (Nonaka and Peltokorpi, 2006, p79; Dervin, 1998, p38)