Knowledge, Culture, and Cultural Impact on Knowledge Management: Some Lessons for Researchers and Practitioners

Introduction To Knowledge

Although the debate on ‘knowledge’ has existed for centuries, dating back to Plato’s (427- 348/347 BC)¹, definition of knowledge as “justified true belief”, knowledge has been defined differently and there exists disagreement on what constitutes knowledge. The Collins English Dictionary (1998:857) defined knowledge as:

Existing disagreements were underlined recently by scholars during the 9^th European Academic Conference on Knowledge Management (2008) where scholars summed up the debate by arguing that “there is no solid agreement on what KM is, nor even on what constitutes knowledge” (Rees, 2008:1). Academics further argued that:

• •

  Knowledge management is a cross-cutting issue, not a single subject domain

• •

  To date there remains disagreement on methodologies, definitions and processes of research and working within knowledge and its management

• •

  There are, however, emerging trends, but no new dominant approaches and methodologies regarding knowledge and its management,

• •

  Within the limitations of agreement, there were shared grounds and common fundamentals.

Referring to the above aspects of knowledge management research, Bolissani (2008) shows that academics are in agreement on the types and composites of knowledge – and how knowledge transfer can be achieved (both by focusing on characteristics of codified and tacit knowledge). Codified knowledge is that which can be written down, stored and transmitted through material forms, as opposed to tacit knowledge which is by and large accepted as a form of experience which can be learnt though interaction and in action learning. Tacit knowledge cannot be written down (Polyani, 1966). From the broad discussion that will follow, the reader will discover that there is a need to think beyond the meanings different authors have taken forward regarding cultural implications on knowledge management issues. The main reason is because there are possibilities that discussing culture in written forms poses challenges that the debate itself can be limited by the contextual analysis as well as perspectives of the author. In any case however, there is a general agreement that knowledge transfer and knowledge management are understood as the sharing of ideas, knowledge or experiences between a group of people, between units of a company, or between a company and its customers and vice versa. The authors accept that knowledge can be either tangible or intangible and knowledge transfer is therefore a process responsible for gathering, analysing, storing and sharing this knowledge within an organisation with the primary purpose of managing that knowledge to improve as to improve efficiency by reducing the need to self-repeat in the search through the existing knowledge.