New Perspectives on Knowledge Management

Types Of Knowledge And The Process Of Knowledge Management

The field of knowledge management is characterized by a wide array of theoretical perspectives. Research spans a lot of disciplines (e.g. information systems, organizational behavior, psychology, economics, or sociology). Due to this vast quantity of publications, an integrative framework is provided for organizing the literature on knowledge management (Argote, Mc Evily, & Reagans, 2003). The framework consists of two dimensions; the first is the “knowledge management outcome” characterized by “creation,” “retention” and “transfer.” The other one represents the “properties of the context within which knowledge management occurs.”

Quite a lot of knowledge management literature focuses on different knowledge properties (Kogut & Zander, 1993), which affect the way knowledge is created (Nonaka, 1991; Nonaka, von Krogh, & Voelpel, 2006), transferred (von Krogh & Venzin, 1995) or retained (Uzzi & Lancaster, 2003). That is why we want to give a brief state of the art overview concerning knowledge management literature on (1) different properties of knowledge and (2) various knowledge management outcomes, focusing on creation, transfer and retention. To conclude we present a model regarded from a new perspective that combines these three outcome steps, additionally considering the “environment.”