This particular knowledge process Cycle (KPC) or Knowledge Ecology is an integrated field, which maps out the way the various components of knowledge interact, and link. It is based on the different epistemological requirements of the each of the phases in the generation of knowledge. It includes experience, data, ante-formal knowledge, formal knowledge, strategic knowledge and communities of practitioners, and incorporates both predictable and complex knowledge.
Published in Chapter:
A Knowledge Process Cycle
Roy Williams (University of Portsmouth, UK)
Copyright: © 2011
|Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-931-1.ch082
Abstract
Knowledge is defined in many different ways in different cultures (Nonaka, 1994, Burrows et al., 2005), and the question is whether knowledge should be seen: as an object or as meaning, an object or a process, subjective or objective, tacit or explicit, positivist or interpretivist, representationalist or constructivist. The answer to all these questions is: “both, it depends”. Knowledge can be one or more of these things, it depends on the context and the culture. Most writers are agreed that knowledge is a now a key asset, and that managing knowledge is crucial to corporate success (Drucker, 2001a, b). However Spender and Marr (2005, p. 183) write that the “enthusiasm [for] the idea that knowledge has become the most strategic of corporate assets … has not …been matched by an understanding of how to operationalize knowledge … [because it is] a different kind of asset”. The question remains: what is knowledge, in what ways is it “a different kind of asset”, and how can it best be operationalized? The digital global ecology of web2 fundamentally changes the way we need to answer these questions.