Abstract
Personal knowledge is the construction of the individual. It is the context of factual knowledge and experience. Collective work, thinking, writing requires adaptation, adjustment, coordination. The VID SME Group demonstrates the significance of collective knowledge, as the group is dominated by diversity, manifold ordering, but also by the maintenance and coordination of plurality. The present paper provides the framework and the praxis of the plural management of collective knowledge, hence allowing for the attainment of the approach and thinking lying therein. Following an overview of the background of the adopted systemic, pluralistic approach, the paper gives insight into the VID Group's systemically, corporally-corporately and textually ordered architecture, into its management and control praxes of collective knowledge, but it also presents the business group's principles, tasks, networks, its functional ordering and connections.
TopBackground
Economic science belongs to the social sciences. The turn of research in the field of the social sciences, which called attention to the insufficiency of a merely technical approach, has already been noted by Cifford Geertz (1983) in his book entitled Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. Geertz formulates the insight that “the broader currents of modern thought” have brought about a turn that signals a new direction in the study of society, which “seems on the way to becoming seriously irregular. It is certainly becoming more pluralistic” (Geertz, 1983, pp. 3–4).
The social systemic approach of the organization, as an economic subsystem of society, may also seem irregular. It may seem irregular due to its demand of multiple perspectives, its claim for research results from multiple disciplines. However, such a pluralistic approach is justified and has been acknowledged by theorists of management. Its justification lies in its being necessitated by science, order and the pluralistic nature of organizations. The present paper follows such a pluralistic, multi-layered approach by way of coordinating, advocating and integrating various disciplines, orders and diversity itself.