Knowledge Management

The Practices of Knowledge Managers

In the last conference of the Strategic Management Society in Koln (Germany), I presented a paper that summarized my PhD dissertation on the practices of knowledge managers in corporations. In this work, I adopt an activity system lens to understand the contradictions inside the activity system of the managers. Three conflicts of the knowledge management function are studied: the length of the mandate (long-term versus short-term); the instruments used to measure the impact of knowledge management initiatives on organizational performance and the governance chosen to manage the social networks and the databases.

> You can download the slideshow of the presentation by clicking here

Publish or Perish ?

Good news: one of my article has been published in the last issue of the scientific journal of the University Paris Dauphine.

The article can be accessed online by going on this link or by downloading a PdF version of the article by clicking here.

M@n@gement is a highly selective journal that has been ranked Category 2 by the CNRS (=three stars). To check the new ranking made by the CNRS of journals in economics and management, click on this link: Téléchargement Liste_2007_final.pdf (Updated in October 2007).

One comment I would like to make about writing academic articles: it is one important task of a teacher in a business school. Some colleagues say "this is THE task". I tend to disagree with this. I am not a writer. I am a part-time researcher. When I am a researcher, my main activity is to explore companies, interview workers, observe practices, benchmark ideas, understand what I see, analyse what I collect, push people to talk, make sense out of numerous data.

The other part of my time is dedicated to teaching. I profess, I discuss with students,  I read their reports, I control what I read, I exchange ideas with students. It is different, I think.

I tend to think that business schools have put the emphasize too much on research and less on pedagogy. I am not the only one to think that. Look at the study made by the AACSB on the impact of research made in business schools in the USA by clicking on this link.

"A report released evaluates the nature and purposes of business school research and recommends steps to increase its value to students, practicing managers, and society. The report, issued by the Impact of Research task force of AACSB International, is released as a draft to solicit comments and feedback from business schools, their faculties and others. "

Anyway, the debate about research and teaching is a never-ending one. I hope the latter won't be sacrified on the altar of the former...

10 research articles you should read

This year, I had to create a course in Knowledge Management in Audencia. My first idea was to select articles that students should read. Here is my (subjective) selection:

1. If only we knew what we know: identification and transfer of internal best practices. O'Dell, C., & Grayson, J. (1998) California Management Review, 40(3), 154-174.
2. Balancing act: how to capture knowledge without killing it. Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000) Harvard Business Review (May-June).
3. Why information technology inspired but cannot deliver knowledge management. McDermott, R. (1999) California Management Review, 41(4), 104-117.
4. Knowledge management strategies: toward taxonomy. Earl, M. (2001) Journal of Mangement Information Systems, 18(1), 215-233.
5. Successful knowledge management projects. Davenport, T., DeLong, D., & Beers, M. (1998) Sloan Management Review, 39(2), 43-57.
6. Organizing knowledge.Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (1998) California Management Review, 40(3), 90-111.
7. Communities of practice: the organizational frontier. Wenger, E., & Snyder, W. (2000) Harvard Business Review, 78(1), 139-145.
8. Knowledge management as a doughnut: shaping your knowledge strategy trough communities of practice. Wenger, E. (2004) Ivey Business Journal (January/February).
9. Knowledge management: philosophy, processes and pitfalls. Soo, C., Devinney, T., Midgley, D., & Deering, A. (2002) California Management Review, 44(4), 129-150.
10. Introducing T-shaped managers: knowledge management’s next generation. Hansen, M. (2001) Harvard Business Review, 79(March), 106-116.

Publications in Knowledge Management

Back to my blog, I would like to share with you one of the result from my research: the publishing trend in knowledge management.
Based on query made on EBSCO, I have found the following results. What you can see is the growing interest and the positive trend of publications mentioning the term "knowledge management".

The split between academic articles (peer reviewed) and magazines is interesting. It shows that "knowledge management", as an object of study, is now a strong research trend (mainly anchored in the strategic management field and in the information system field). So far, it seems that this trend tends to decrease this year...bad news !??!

> To study the full chart, please click here

Standing on the "shoulder of giants"

As a researchers I am a dwarf perched on the soulders of giants. I see more and farther than my predecessors, not because I have a keener vision or greater height, but because I am lifted up thanks to the body of knowledge accumulated in research articles and books. A PhD dissertation, in a way, is an exercise that needs to climb up and down from the shoulders, go back to the choice points that the giant started with, rethink those choice points and see if it should make sense to remake those. Each generation of researchers steps in the faces of its predecessors...

Great News: HEC & Academy of Management

  All doctoral students in management science know how important it is to write, communicate (in Conferences) and publish (in Scientific Journals) research articles. The moto is "publish or perish". That is why I am glad that one of my paper co-edited with Prof. Bertrand Moingeon has been:

- published as a working paper in the Cahier de Recherches d'HEC;

- accepted at the next conference of the Academy of Management in Atlanta (August 11th to 16th), in the track "Managerial and Organizational Cognition".

Major topics in this track include: attention, attribution, decision making, identity, ideology, image, information processing, knowledge creation and management, learning, memory, mental representations, perceptual and interpretive processes, reputation, social construction, and symbols.

The "Academy" - as I should say - is THE place to be when you do research in management science.

> The working paper can be downloaded by clicking here.

Paper: Lost In Translation

For the next conference organized by ESADE Business School, Rhetoric & Management, in May the 11th, 12th and 13rd, I am currently writing a paper called "Lost in Translation: Why Organizations Should Facilitate Knowledge Transfer".

It starts like this:

    In the movie Lost in Translation the two main characters, Bob and Charlotte, experience the feeling of being “lost” in a foreign country. Both do not speak the language and they feel detached from the existing world. In this paper, I support the view that when knowledge is transferred in organizations, the same process occurs: a great part of it is “lost in translation”.
    Even if knowledge transfer has been extensively studied both in theory and in practice in the last few years, very few analyses have been made in the lenses of rhetoric. With very few exceptions (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000) organizational knowledge transfer - defined as the process through which one unit (eg. group, department or division) is affected by the experience of another (Argote and Ingram, 2000: 151) - has been mainly represented as a communication process. Complementary to this view, I propose to interpret the circulation of knowledge in organizations as a process of translation: knowledge is not only transferred between two entities but transformed during that process.

> To read the abstract in PdF, please click here .

Syllabi of Knowledge Management & Organizational Learning courses

I have found a very useful website made by Peter Gray from Katz School of Business (University of Pittsburgh). He has collected all the syllabi of Knowledge Management & Organizational Learning courses in American universities.

This web site contains two sets of links:
(1) A short list of useful links to papers and web sites pertaining to teaching KM
(2) A longer list of researchers, in alphabetical order, who have provided one or more course description, outline, and/or syllabus that is related to Organizational Learning and/or Knowledge Management.

You can add your own syllabus by mailing him.

I just have one word to him: BRAVO ! It really makes me my life easier when I have to think about lecturing in my research area.

> Go to this web site by clicking here.

Taylor's Scientific Principles of Scientifc Management

Published in 1911, the book of Frederick Winslow Taylor "The principles of Scientific of Management" is one of this seminal work widely misinterpreted. I have on the Internet a free electronic version of this fundamental work.

> You can read the book by clicking here.

> You can download the .txt file of the book here .

1st Conference on Rhetoric and Management

The business school where I am currently studying (ESADE) is organizing the 1st Conference on "Rhetoric & Management".

• Date: 11-13 May 2006
• Location: Barcelona
• Link: http://www.esade.edu/rnmr06

An abstract of 1000 words is required. It must be submitted before the 28th of Feb.

Speakers are:

- Barbara Czarniawska, Swedish Research Council & Malmsten Foundation; Professor of Management Studies; GRI-Research Institute at the School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University.

- Hans Siggaard Jensen, Executive Research Director - Head of the Laboratory, Learning Lab Denmark, The Danish University of Education.

- Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago; Professor of Economics, History, English; Distinguished Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Art and Cultural Studies, Erasmus universiteit Rotterdam.

- Eduard Bonet, Former Director PhD Programmes at ESADE (URL).

I hope to see you there...