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Knowledge Management or the Management of Knowledge?

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Book cover Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning

Part of the book series: Annals of Information Systems ((AOIS,volume 4))

Abstract

Knowledge Management has become in the past few decades an important branch of the wider discipline of Information Systems. Its importance is based on the observation that we live in a knowledge society and that knowledge has become a crucial component of a competitive organization. This essay argues that knowledge is a mark of civilization and has been discussed, disputed and managed in most spheres of human activity for all of history. The management of knowledge has been and is associated with control and power. Hence knowledge has been and is manipulated to achieve objectives beyond the ideal of truth. There is a dark side to the management of knowledge as exemplified by censorship, spin and propaganda. A study and understanding of the management of knowledge is needed if we want the discipline of knowledge management to be more than an idealistic rhetoric.

Knowledge is Power (Sir Francis Bacon, 1597)

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton, 1949)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Take the biblical phrase “to know a women” and note the many levels at which this phrase can be interpreted.

  2. 2.

    See http://www.opendefinition.org/ for definition and http://www.okfn.org/ for more about the Open Knowledge Foundation.

  3. 3.

    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management.

  4. 4.

    The Guardian Newspaper, 28 March 2008, 36 pp.

  5. 5.

    See http://www.sanger.ac.uk/press/2002/021007/shtml

  6. 6.

    See http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/human_genome/shtml

  7. 7.

    See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

  8. 8.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization

  9. 9.

    http://www.citywire.co.uk/adviser/-/news/property-and-mortgages/content.aspx?ID=293217.

  10. 10.

    A version was given as a keynote presentation at the IRIS Conference in Tampere, Finland in August 2007

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  1. Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, London School of Economics, London, UK

    Frank Land

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Correspondence to Frank Land .

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    Land, F. (2009). Knowledge Management or the Management of Knowledge?. In: King, W. (eds) Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning. Annals of Information Systems, vol 4. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0011-1_2

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