KMCI Press is an exciting publishing partnership bringing together the International Knowledge Management Consortium (KMCI), the leading organization for knowledge management professionals, and the Butterworth-Heinemann business group and Digital Press imprints, one of the leading publishers of knowledge management books. knowledge. Knowledge Management Foundations strive to put knowledge management (“KM” to its friends) on a secure intellectual footing.
Much Ado about Knowledge: Why Now?
Historical Myopia as a Precondition for Knowledge Management
When managers interfere with the performance of knowledge work, knowledge workers have the ability to bite back and interfere with managerial work. In terms of factors of production, knowledge workers appear more as raw material than as labor.
What’s in a Name?: “Knowledge Management”
The end of the Cold War has, however, given a new vision for the knowledge society. Only now is the capitalist factory replacing the feudal estate as the model for the well-ordered society.
Knowledge and Information
The integrity of the agent's research and the reliability of her findings are not in question. Once the agent learns enough to eliminate all but one option, the search ends (cf.
The Scientist: KM’s Enemy Number One?
Newton, of relatively humble origins, was one of the few members of the early Royal Society who had to be paid a steady college salary in order to survive. But the consequences of demanding payment for research go beyond the subject of the next scientific documentary.
The KM Challenge to Knowledge in Theory and Practice
KM and the End of Knowledge in Theory
Indeed, knowledge management can be seen as primarily in the business of manipulating scarcity, on either the supply or the demand side of the exchange equation. The first is the ethereal good, in which, once produced, consumers of the good incur no additional costs (Thompson 1982, Bates 1988).
KM and the End of Knowledge in Practice
Knowledge management updates the spirit that led to the burning of the library of Alexandria and the stigmatization of universities during the scientific and industrial revolutions. The result is a set of academic "league tables"—the implied metaphor is from soccer—ranking all departments in all of the U.K.'s 100-plus universities.
Back to Basics: Rediscovering the Value of Knowledge in Rent, Wage, Profit
The salary seeker is interested in arithmetic as an inherently valuable mental skill, regardless of the purposes to which it may be put. Despite their palpable differences, all three perspectives accept the validity of Bacon's Knowledge is Power equation.
The Epistemic Empire Strikes Back
The business community is represented by most of the major Swedish multinationals, including Volvo, Ericsson and AstraZeneca. On a metaphysical level, this conversation constructs what might be called the "subjectivity" or "conscience" of the company.
Squaring the KM Circle
Just as the Great Depression led to the creation of regulatory agencies (e.g., the US Securities and Exchange Commission) to monitor stock market activity, something similar may be needed once knowledge acceleration becomes a financially viable practice. The ultimate significance of a scientific innovation cannot be reduced to the competitive advantage it brings someone to the market - at least in the relatively short-term sense in which one normally speaks of 'competitive advantage'. The competitive advantage gained from new knowledge depends largely on one's ability to create demand for it (Drucker 1954).
The Basic Philosophical Obstacle to Knowledge Management
The Philosophical Problem of Knowledge and Its Problems
However, the idea of knowledge as "instrumentality" pulls in opposing directions (cf. Abelson 1986 on "beliefs"). Indeed, the scientist can succeed in adding to the storehouse of knowledge without knowing exactly how or why (cf. Rothschild 1973, on the contradictory inferences that producers can make from sales patterns in the market). Indeed, part of what classically conferred the status of knowledge on beliefs is that they remain true even without the intervention of the knower (cf. Hacking 1983, Part I).
The Creation of Knowledge Markets
An Offer No Scientist Can Refuse: Why Scientists Share The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has promoted a version of
This would undermine the rationality of the mutual protection racket, the purpose of which is to use unresolved threats to immunize agents against the urge to disrupt the status quo. Although reported as a victory for South Africa (home to 15% of AIDS sufferers worldwide), the settlement effectively strengthens the drugmakers' control of the market by driving out potential local competitors. Such citations then function as protection, in case someone from the camp of one of the cited authors would be a peer reviewer of the citing scientist's work.
Materializing the Marketplace of Ideas: Is Possessing Knowledge Like Possessing Money?
- Knowledge’s Likeness to Money
- Knowledge’s Unlikeness to Money
Salmon 1967). f) Control: money creates a sense of control over the value of a good by enabling a resolution of the price of the good. However, with money, the value of the cow can be more or less fixed and with the money you get in return you can buy whatever you want. But Simmel's supposed disanalogy doesn't take seriously enough the fact that the value of knowledge depends on it normally being in the hands of a few.
Intellectual Property as the Nexus of Epistemic Validity and Economic Value
The Challenges Posed by Dividing the Indivisible
To appreciate the difference that process costs can make to an epistemologist's sense of the value of knowledge, consider what distinguishes Karl Popper's (1963) and Paul Feyerabend's (1975) visions of criticism in the growth of knowledge. In short: the sharper the line and the more the distribution side of the line is obscured, the more the good resembles knowledge. In the first case, a major part of the consumer's costs would be access to the vehicle at one of the distribution points.
The Challenges Posed by Inventing the Discovered
In other words, there is no check on consumer demand that is independent of the convergent opinion of those who have invested in the production of the good. Consumer abuse or incompetence—and not the limitations of the vehicle—will account for the outliers. But ultimately one must move beyond the workplaces of physicists and engineers to study the forging of the physics market.
Interlude: Is the Knowledge Market Saturated or Depressed?: Do We Know Too
For this reason, economists were intuitively attracted to Say's law, as discussed in the previous section. We generally assume that something similar to Say's Law is at work in terms of knowledge production. In one of the original defenses of Say's Law, David Ricardo argued that what economists call "depressions" are actually reduced levels of production, that is, the presence of an insufficient amount of goods.
Recapitulation: From Disciplines and Professions to Intellectual Property Law
Disciplines emphasize control over the means of knowledge production, which is sharply separated from applications of the discipline's knowledge. For example, she is less likely to claim originality (at least over a large domain) for her own efforts, since her credentials must be scrutinized and confirmed regularly by canon-holders with whom she is supposed to share a common knowledge. This is possible because public commitment to state-of-the-art science, technology and medicine remains broad but superficial – that is, a commitment to the professional but not the disciplinary dimension of these bodies of knowledge.
The Legal Epistemology of Intellectual Property
Two Strategies for Studying the Proprietary Grounds of Knowledge
This standard can best be approached historically by tracing the vicissitudes that accompanied the production, distribution, and use of, say, Newton's Principia Mathematica, which would be more and less than an intellectual biography of Sir Isaac. It would have been more if it had also included a discussion of the many minor figures whose work contributed to Newton's book becoming a medium through which a wide range of narrowly scientific and other social interests could be articulated (cf. Latour 1987). . But it would be less so if we did not seek to make Newton himself the coherent agent for whom the Principles represented the crowning achievement of his cosmological vision.
Epilogue: Alienating Knowledge from the Knower and the Commodification of Expertise
Social capital invokes a distinctive character of the knowledge embodied in the expert: namely, that the same act can be considered competent or incompetent, depending on the history that presumably led to the act; specifically whether the agent is presumed to have acquired the relevant knowledge in the appropriate manner, typically "credentials" (but also sometimes "experience"). This point was promoted to a metaphysical conundrum with the dawn of the knowledge community in the form of the Turing Test, Alan Turing's thought experiment that almost single-handedly launched the search for "artificial intelligence" in the 1950s. Croskery 1989 was one of the first to locate bioprospecting in the conceptual universe of intellectual property.).
Introduction: From Epistemology to Information Technology
The large-scale result of this behavioral trend has been the "standardization" of the world that sociologists have associated with the widespread use of virtually any technology. However, the great advantage of the computer lies in the ability for users to reliably access large amounts of information specifically relevant to their needs with minimal effort. Leonardo da Vinci is only the most famous of the many people who tried to design such a machine.
The Post-Industrial Dream: The
Regularity and reproducibility—the virtues that Bell identified in the new intellectual technologies—appeared in the eyes of his critics as the latest educated inabilities of the learned classes. The discontent generated by the new intellectual technologies in the 1960s is summed up in one word: alienation. In the confused heat of the debate, however, the latter concern overrode the former.
Society’s Shifting Human–Computer Interface
It's the second horn of the dilemma, I think, that most directly challenges the future of the social sciences. The history of the electronic word repeats much of the plot of the printed word, but one-tenth the time and with a twist in the last act (Perrolle. The first generation of computers in the 1950s - the ones immortalized in sci-fi films from that period - occupied large rooms, although they contained less memory and processing power than the average personal computer (PC) of today.
From Expertise to Expert Systems 1. A Brief Social History of Expertise
How Knowledge Engineers Benefit from the Social Character of Expertise
The disposition of expertise depends on the collegial models of the respective experts. First, the state agrees not to interfere in the internal governance of the profession, provided that the profession does not interfere in the governance of the state. The most obvious result of these four tactics is to shape the behavior of the potential client so that her problem falls into one of the stereotypical patterns with which the expert is familiar.
The Lessons of Expert Systems for the Sociology of Knowledge Systems
Moreover, the customer's propensity to accept responsibility for the bad advice increases with the amount of money she originally had to spend to purchase the system. But for the constructivist, there is no "fact of the matter" about whether the expert's incompetence or the client's recalcitrance is to blame, until the transaction actually takes place. For example, the degree of satisfaction the customer derives from using an expert system has implications for the amount of human expertise that has presumably been transferred to the computer program.
Expert Systems and the Pseudo-Democratization of Expertise
After all, if expertise is indeed constitutively social, changing the context in which expert knowledge is deployed must change the character of the knowledge itself. Expert systems are thus discussed, not as the latest phase in the capitalist mediation of social relations, but rather as part of the vanguard of. In the process of defining the minimum level of acceptability for a particular good, manufacturers effectively forced potential customers to adapt their behavior to the established dimensions of the good.
Recapitulation: Expertise as the Ultimate Subject of Intellectual Property
Bioprospecting is usually discussed in the context of genes held by certain relatively isolated ethnic groups. In sum, in the first age of information technology—the age of the printed word—state-licensed professional communities helped restore some sense of authoritative knowledge in the relatively free and chaotic world of published opinion. Since this would certainly take us back to the Dark Ages, it may be time to rethink the idea that human expertise is a scarce natural resource.
Why Even Scholars Don’t Get a Free Lunch in Cyberspace
- A Tale of Two Technophilosophies
- The Publishing Industry as the Cyberscapegoat
- Adding Some Resistance to the Frictionless Medium of Thought
- Why Paperlessness Is No Panacea
- Does Cyberspace “Deserve” Peer Review?
Yet a trace of the old spirit of gamesmanship survives in the priority disputes that continue to punctuate the scientific enterprise. Throughout the ascendancy of the peer review process, publishers have often functioned as correctives to the protected markets that constitute academic specialties. Indeed, it has jeopardized the future of the most creative aspect of publishing: marketing (Horowitz 1986).
