Scarbrough, Harry

2006-06-06

Scarbrough and Swan treat KM as a management fashion (depending on the source, this is more or less explicit). They study the diffusion of management fashion and use KM as a case study. Management knowledge is created by trend setters (consultants, gurus, business schools) and adopted by consumers (managers). Their main argument is that professional groups play an important role in mediating this process, by legitimating and appropriating the discourse.

KM discourse in said to be polymorphous, multifaceted. Many interpretations. Best one to cite is Swan and Scarbrough, 2002. the factors that promote the successful diffusion of KM as a concept preclude its implementation as a practice. KM has been interpreted in different ways by different professional communities and, while this contributed to its popular appeal, it also poses problems for its overall coherence as an organizational practice. heterogeneous groups tend to discuss and interpret KM in different terms.

They tracked KM publications in academic and popular media (ProQuest), focusing on how those publications were distributed among different professional groups. Journals were categorized among professional groups. A total of 1,122 articles on KM between 1990 and 2000. They also carried out a qualitative analyses of the content and identified the key themes and discourses of KM.

It is clear that KM has not diffused evenly. Articles grouped according professional journals show that the IT/IS community were dominant, with just over 41% of articles. This shows they have appropriated the KM discourse. They emphasized knowledge capture and codification, to capture and codify tacit knowledge so it can be more widely shared and reused. This emphasizes the use of KM systems that allow that. Knowledge is seen as objectifiable an IT is therefore central.

Other groups also tried to colonize the discourse, giving specific and particular interpretations. HRM and organization theory focus on developing people, building social communities and organizational processes. Building, creating and developing cultures and communities.

Artificial intelligence professionals focus on knowledge representation and elicitation. Developing expert systems that represent the knowledge of experts. They are sometimes dismissive of generic software applications that deal with information and not knowledge, in their view.

Accountants focus on measuring human and intellectual capital, so they can explain the large discrepancies between market and book value of companies.

In Scarbrough and Swan, 2002, they compare KM and learning organization (LO) discourses. While LO was going down after 1995, KM experienced a surge of interest since then. They again identify a dominance of the IT/IS community (47.7% of articles from 1993 to 1999). The main themes in KM discourse were found to be 1) a universal concern with KM's critical role in business performance, 2) managing knowledge as a strategic resource, and 3) processing and storing knowledge. They compare the different foci of discourses: LO is broader, seeking to ensure continuous organizational transformation, while KM focus on helping firms in turbulent times to mobilize their knowledge to innovate. LO seeks to improve the firm's learning capability through people development, empowerment, leadership and culture change. KM focus on capturing, codifying, and using knowledge and experience of employees. Although they differentiate the KM and LO discourses, the authors say KM is being reconstructed by the HR community as the creation of intellectual capital through the development of employees and the management of organizational culture. KM as a popular term provides a trigger to resurface and revitalize change processes associated with earlier LO initiatives. That is, LO morphed [fused] into KM.