Re-energising Knowledge Management: Communication challenges, interdisciplinary intersections, and paradigm change

Abstract

Knowledge Management (KM) in the 1990s was a key upwardly-mobile management discipline. Indeed, a proliferation of articles suggested KM had the potential to make a radical departure from conventional views of organisational assets and resources, and even held the promise of transforming economies. Instead, however, KM has tended to become incorporated as a subset of traditional management. This thesis suggests that, as a result, knowledge has been perceived simply as another resource to be managed for competitive advantage. It further argues that KM need not subscribe to conventional views of management and that knowledge need not be just another resource to be exploited, hoarded, and traded. Instead, it contends that knowledge is an outcome of the process of connecting to one another in new ways and explores the field’s still-unrealised potential for generating fresh approaches relevant to contemporary conditions. In seeking to revive the excitement, and rekindle the potential, that originally surrounded the field, the thesis intervenes in current debates in KM. It attends to, and expands, the existing discourses of KM while presenting the case for a re-energised understanding of the communication of knowledge. Exploring intersections with other disciplines as well as KM’s own multidisciplinary base, it proposes transdisciplinary research as a productive focus for KM. In making these recommendations for KM’s future, the thesis seeks to make the field more responsive to current complex and dynamic academic, organisational, and social contexts. Its overall goal is not only to ensure KM’s ongoing relevance and effectiveness as a field, but to direct KM towards fulfilling its early potential.