Knowledge Management Foundations

Steve Fuller

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136389818
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Business generale

'Knowledge Management Foundations' is just what it claims, the first attempt to provide a secure intellectual footing for the myriad of practices called "knowledge management." A breath of fresh air from the usual KM gurus, Fuller openly admits that the advent of KM is a mixed blessing that often amounts to the conduct of traditional management by subtler means. However, Fuller's deep understanding of both the history of management theory and knowledge production more generally enables him to separate the wheat from the chaff of the KM literature. This ground-breaking book will prove of interest to both academics and practitioners of knowledge management. It highlights the ways in which KM has challenged the values associated with knowledge that academics have taken for granted for centuries. At the same time, Fuller resists the conclusion of many KM gurus, that the value of knowledge lies in whatever the market will bear in the short term. He pays special attention to how information technology has not only facilitated knowledge work but also has radically altered its nature. There are chapters devoted to the revolution in intellectual property and an evaluation of peer review as a quality control mechanism. The book culminates in a positive re-evaluation of universities as knowledge producing institutions from which the corporate sector still has much to learn.

1

WHAT KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT HAS MANAGED TO DO TO KNOWLEDGE

			1.	Much Ado about Knowledge: Why Now?
					1.1.	Historical Myopia as a Precondition for Knowledge Management
					1.2.	What’s in a Name?: “Knowledge Management”
			2.	Knowledge and Information: The Great Bait and Switch
			3.	The Scientist: KM’s Enemy Number One?
			4.	The KM Challenge to Knowledge in Theory and Practice
					4.1.	KM and the End of Knowledge in Theory: The Deconstruction of Public Goods
					4.2.	KM and the End of Knowledge in Practice: The Disintegration of the University
			5.	Back to Basics: Rediscovering the Value of Knowledge in Rent, Wage, Profit
			6.	The Epistemic Empire Strikes Back: Metapublic Goods and the Injection of Academic Values into Corporate Enterprise
			7.	Squaring the KM Circle: Who’s Afraid of Accelerating the Production of New Knowledge?

1. MUCH ADO ABOUT KNOWLEDGE: WHY NOW?

“Knowledge management,” “knowledge society,” and not least the burgeoning employment prospects of “chief knowledge officers” (“CKOs”) are signs of our times. To the naïve observer, it is perfectly obvious that knowledge has always played an important role in the organization and advancement of society. In that sense, saying that we live in a “knowledge society” would seem to be no more informative than saying that we live in a “power society” or a “money society” or a “culture society.” But perhaps “knowledge” here is really an instance of what rhetoricians call catachresis, i.e., the strategic misuse of words, a euphemism for something a bit unsavory. After all, that knowledge would need to be literally “managed” suggests that its growth should not be left in a wild state: at best it remains unused and at worst it is wasted. Yet, this managerial mindset goes against the grain of the last 2500 years of Western thought, which has valued the pursuit of knowledge “for its own sake,” regardless of its costs and benefits.

People who claim to know something about KM must decide whether the field is more about knowledge or management. The dark secret of this field is that its name is an oxymoron, for as soon as business enters the picture, the interests of knowledge and management trade off against each other. After all, why spend valuable resources generating new knowledge, if one can simply try to do what one has always done, only more efficiently? To be sure, rising to the level of efficiency demanded of the market can take different forms. It may take the Taylorist route of increasing the level of surveillance on one’s own workers, so that more of the fruits of their labors are reaped by their corporate employers. Alternatively, it may involve acquiring a better understanding of the market itself. In short: What do consumers want? Who, if anyone, is currently providing it? Or, more ambitiously: What can consumers be made to want?

It is only in response to these questions that knowledge is of interest to management. In that respect, “knowledge management” is little more than talk about ordinary management in a world that has become a little too complex for traditional managers to handle. However, complexity is primarily a mathematical feature of reality, referring to an increase in the number of dimensions that need to be taken into account. We can acknowledge that our world has become more complex without necessarily concluding that it demands a qualitatively different mode of analysis. Managers who remain skeptical of the value of investing in people and machines designed to provide something called “knowledge management” figured this out a long time ago.

We are used to thinking that knowledge is produced by hard work that is never fully rewarded, the fruits of which are nevertheless distributed as widely as possible. For economists, this is what distinguishes knowledge as a public good. However, from a KM standpoint, it is not a very economic scenario. It would be better for the reverse to occur. Effort toward innovation would then be discouraged except where profits are likely to follow. This would license, on the one hand, the redundancy of research staff and, on the other, the acquisition of intellectual property rights. In both cases, capturing knowledge takes precedence over cultivating it.

Generally speaking, the competitive advantage likely to be gained from the introduction of a new product largely depends on one’s ability to create a demand for it, which usually has more to do with an ability to second-guess consumers than anything truly revolutionary in the product itself. Thus, relatively small innovations can end up making major profits for big companies, while truly radical innovations can be easily captured or ignored. And if the fate of non-petroleum-fueled cars is any indication, some innovations may even be captured in order to be ignored.

These features of the Realpolitik of KM acquire a special poignancy in the country from which I write, the United Kingdom. It begins to explain why the recent surge in the number of British scientific publications and patents has failed to enhance our national competitiveness in global markets. Even if there is some truth to the widespread view that scientists and businesspeople do not communicate with each other very well, a deeper problem is that business-people regard the need for new knowledge as the moral equivalent of a necessary evil: the more necessary, the more evil. Economists often fail to recognize this point because of the rather patronizing attitude towards business that is enshrined in their “constrained optimization” model of rational action. In this model, the average corporate executive appears as a harried and impatient person—a “bounded rational” agent, in Herbert Simon’s terms—who must strike a balance between doing what is best in the short and long terms (Fuller 1985). This may involve curtailing the work of the Research and Development (“R&D”) division. However, had the corporation a limitless supply of time and resources, it would (allegedly) increase its R&D investments and eventually reap the corresponding benefits, since new knowledge is presumed to be the royal road to an increased market share.

The rise of knowledge management reveals that “the average corporate executive” does not think like this at all. Indicative is the difference in the biological imagery to which the economist and the KM specialist typically appeal. Economists regard new knowledge as spontaneously generated, much like a mutation that eventually becomes the basis for a new species. Despite their pessimism about the prospects for controlling the growth of knowledge, economists are generally optimistic that such uncontrolled growth will ultimately result in overall good. In contrast, knowledge managers regard the uncontrollable character of knowledge growth as itself a problem. Where economists imagine a proliferation of new variations and species, knowledge managers see only potential weeds that crowd out the effort needed to maximize profitability. Where economists see “factors of production” in the staff and equipment of the average knowledge-intensive firm, knowledge managers see “conspicuous consumption,” the cost-effectiveness of which is presumed dubious, unless proven otherwise.

Difference in historical perspective plays an important role here. Economists’ views of knowledge remain anchored in the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century, when capitalized innovation did indeed result in a general expansion of markets and increase in wealth—at least in the Europeanized world. However, KM is anchored in the “information explosion” of the late 20th and early 21st century, in which corporations are struggling to cope with overflowing databases, the care of which has been left to a highly skilled but mobile labor force.

But knowledge management is equally about academics whose employment prospects have been improved since the 1980s by moving from the arts and sciences faculties to the business schools. This move reflected the global success of capitalism (a.k.a. USA) over socialism (a.k.a. USSR) that marked the end of the Cold War. Here it is worth recalling that, generally speaking, the expansion of the arts and sciences faculties in universities in the 19th and 20th centuries had been nation-building exercises motivated by the prospect of citizen mobilization in time of war. The humanities provided instruction in the values that needed to be upheld; the social sciences taught the relevant mechanisms of social control; and the natural sciences contributed to the consolidation and upgrading of the nation’s infrastructure and defense system. However, in times of peace, these disciplines potentially created obstacles to commerce by reifying differences that could be otherwise negotiated away in the free exchange of goods and services. Thus, from a strictly capitalistic standpoint, language differences between trading partners are not indicative of vast cultural chasms that require many years of experience—or advanced academic degrees—to fathom. Rather, they provide opportunities to construct more efficient forms of communication, what linguists call “pidgins,” that circumvent the need for all this learning. KM continues this “if it’s good for academia, it’s bad for business” mentality—only now within academia itself.

These observations about the origins of knowledge management are complicated by a couple of factors. The first pertains to the field’s historical myopia, the second to the arbitrariness of the field’s name.

1.1. Historical Myopia as a Precondition for Knowledge Management

Even those academics who in the 1980s were driven by “market conditions” into business schools were taken by surprise by the incursion of capitalist values into their own workplaces. I refer here not only to the increased need for “external” (i.e., non-university) sources of income to validate a “demand” for one’s research, but also the use of production and consumption metrics to judge research quality—that is, the number of papers and/or patents produced and the frequency with which they are cited. However, academics have tended to interpret this situation as heralding the emergence of a new post-industrial order, the knowledge society (Stehr 1994), in which “knowledge” is the new “capital” and “knowledge management” the science of this revolutionary order. Seen through these rose-tinted spectacles, knowledge now matters to business in ways it never has before.

Unfortunately, this vision is persuasive only to those with a short historical memory. Ever since Joseph Schumpeter (1961) introduced the “entrepreneur” as the lifeblood of capitalism in 1912, there has been a general appreciation of the centrality of new knowledge —a.k.a. “innovation”—to capital accumulation. However, the legendary entrepreneur championed by Schumpeter was not an academic specialist but a “self-made man” whose confidence was matched only by his determination. The entrepreneur was more Edison than Einstein: a master of induction, not deduction. (In fact, Schumpeter’s favorite example was Henry Ford, who, unlike Edison, managed to incorporate his innovations into a sustained profit-making institution.) But nowadays everyone is more educated. The great entrepreneur of our times, Bill Gates, was a Harvard dropout, not a semiliterate journeyman. And, of course, the people who work for Bill Gates have at least a bachelor’s degree. Given this shrinkage in social distance between academia and industry, it is easy for academics to imagine that business has (finally!) come to realize the value of knowledge to enterprise. This explains the rather sanguine outlook of most of the popular and academic KM literature.

As the reader will have already gathered, my attitude is more skeptical. A concept that informs my skepticism and plays an important explanatory role in the pages that follow is the positional good (Hirsch 1977). KM’s most lasting contribution to our understanding of the nature of knowledge may be its practical demonstration that, other things being equal (i.e., no special effort to institutionalize knowledge as a public good), knowledge is naturally a positional good: Its value is directly tied to its scarcity, such that the more people who possess it, the less valuable it is. This begins to explain the ease with which management gurus have established themselves as theorists and vendors of “intellectual capital” (Stewart 1997). Indeed, the so-called KM revolution is best understood as the extension of fairly conventional management principles to a more demanding class of producers and consumers. What makes them so demanding? I shall focus mainly on how knowledge workers differ from manual laborers, at least as portrayed in the traditional management literature, and then end with a discussion of consumers.

The appeal to common goals in labor–management negotiations—everyone’s interest in keeping the factory open—can no longer be taken for granted in the case of knowledge workers. A scientist who finds the corporate workplace oppressive may take leave to a university or perhaps even start his own company. To be sure, this lack of commitment and ease of mobility among knowledge workers can be used to management’s advantage, as corporations increasingly shift to “just-in-time” and “outsourcing” production strategies, and otherwise flexibly adapt to changing market conditions. However, the downside is that it becomes harder to motivate worker loyalty when it is needed. The old threats and bribes do not work as well anymore. In terms of management strategy, then, there has been a paradigm shift in the preferred school of behavioral psychology. Heavy-handed, Pavlovian classical conditioning has yielded to the subtler Skinnerian form of operant reinforcement that aims not to make the workers better (in spite of themselves) but to discover (and reward) the good they naturally do.

Moreover, the problem of motivating knowledge workers affects union organizers just as much as managers. Unions traditionally leveraged worker solidarity to ensure the welfare of anyone working in a given trade. But knowledge workers are no more likely to show solidarity with fellow knowledge workers than with the managers who employ them. This problem has dogged the history of scientific professionalization. Despite the best efforts of several eminent scientists, no large scientific labor union has ever survived for very long. Indeed, scientists have never been able even to agree on a code of professional conduct. Thus, restrictions on the use of humans (and animals) in experimental research have had to be imposed on scientists by their managers, i.e., administrators and legislators. The most successful example of union-style solidarity among knowledge workers has probably been the securing of tenure in academia. Yet, as post–Cold War market conditions force new academically trained researchers and teachers into short-term contracts that involve shifting between institutions, both in and out of academia, tenure as a symbol of “academic freedom” appears more as an unearned privilege than a mark of collective identity.

In one sense, the situation of knowledge workers has not changed. They are still largely “alienated” from their labor in Marx’s original sense of having little control over how their products are used. But this is a price knowledge workers are often quite happy to pay for retaining control over the actual conduct of their work. Here management has learned a valuable lesson from the U.S. atomic bomb project, which combined exceptionally high funding for very talented people with low day-to-day accountability of their activities. In the end, the goods were delivered. The lesson runs deeper. When managers interfere with the conduct of knowledge work, knowledge workers have the ability to bite back and interfere with managerial work. Indeed, most scientist-led calls for greater public accountability have been motivated by the perception of state interference with the conduct of their own work (e.g., surveillance, coercion), which then spills over into more inclusive concerns about the infringement of civil rights. The managerial solution to this problem is captured in the U.S. poet Robert Frost’s memorable line: “Good fences make good neighbors.” In KM lore, Frost’s principle surfaces in the need for management to provide a friendly “self-organizing” environment that enables knowledge workers to report when they feel ready. (Correspondingly, managers should prepare to cut their losses if the report is not satisfactory.) Knowledge workers are themselves portrayed as psychologically more complex than manual laborers, sporting powers of “reflexivity” lacking in more primitive employees. This is code for the fact that knowledge workers are relatively detached from corporate goals, yet capable of preventing those goals from being realized.

In this context, the Taylorist “scientific manager” brandishing stopwatch and clipboard does not produce the best results. Instead, management must resort to less obtrusive means, especially the employment of ethnographers whose status is not higher but equal to or, better still, lower than that of the knowledge workers they observe and report back on. The presumption here is that knowledge workers—and, to a certain extent, consumers—operate in ways that are mysteriously superior to those of management. Fathoming these ways would (presumably) lead to increased profit margins. At the very least, the resort to subtle means shows that managers are just as alienated from their workers as vice versa. Such double alienation is necessary for KM to acquire its luminous status. Of course, this state of affairs may simply reflect that managers now employ workers and serve customers more sophisticated than they are. It would not be the first time in the history of capitalism that a “knowledge gap” has emerged. The very fact that businesspeople, traditionally not known for their literary interests, have turned many self-help management books into bestsellers suggests that they do not quite believe that native wit and practical experience are sufficient to see them through the next shareholders’ meeting. Indeed, the mass-marketed self-help management book was born of the 1929 New York stock market crash, when it became blatantly obvious that “producers” were a class divided against itself. In Marxist terms, the owners of the means of production—the shareholders—suddenly realized that they did not know how their agents—the managers—were handling their investments.

The first modern management guru, Peter Drucker, emerged from this traumatic episode and has successfully exploited its potential recurrence for the better part of a century. Drucker’s own innovation was to anticipate that the gap between knowledge workers and their managers would come to resemble the original one between managers and owners that led to the 1929 crash: a case of the same shoe now being on the other foot. However, Drucker never lost sight of the fact that knowledge workers are still workers. Thus, his long-standing dislike of both academia and middle management can be easily understood as part of a strategy to ensure that knowledge workers remain relatively atomized and hence more easily shaped to the will of corporate policymakers. On the one hand, universities tend to undermine the loyalty of knowledge workers, much like guilds and unions, by promoting performance standards (a.k.a. “validity” and “reliability”) that increase the costs of knowledge work in ways that their corporate employers would prefer to avoid (e.g., the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment, longer and more elaborate experimental trials). On the other, the presence of intermediate corporate levels tends to hybridize the role of manager and knowledge worker, which in turn threatens to take corporate policy “off message,” as managers come to think more like knowledge workers. Better, then, to leave knowledge workers formally detached from the management structure, while encouraged to communicate their findings and concerns to m...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. What Knowledge Management Has Managed to Do to Knowledge
• 2. Making Knowledge Matter: Philosophy, Economics, and Law
• 3. Information Technology as the Key to the Knowledge Revolution
• 4. A Civic Republican Theory of Knowledge Management
• Appendix. What’s Living and Dead in Peer-Review Processes?
• Conclusion: The Mixed Root Metaphor of Knowledge Management
• References
• Index