Building bridges: A transdisciplinary future for knowledge management

Abstract

Knowledge management (KM) is currently a fragmented field. It is characterised by a range of competing ontological approaches towards knowledge and its management, a consequence of KM's emergence from IS and its subsequent adoption and use in a wide range of management disciplines. Some KM scholars believe the future of KM lies in uniting these approaches by having KM achieve disciplinary status. This paper explores an alternative future for KM - it argues that KM could benefit from being the central focus of transdisciplinary research, rather than a discipline itself. Not to be confused with multi-, inter-, and post-disciplinary approaches, the discussion first carefully explains what is meant by transdisciplinarity. The paper then explores the advantages, as well as the challenges, of transdisciplinarity, before, finally, positioning KM as a potential boundary object of interest and import to many fields of study.