Learning through Knowledge Management

This work is an introduction to knowledge management and consists of a combination of discourse and case studies. Its focus is not sharply defined and some of the work deals with management in a generic sense rather than directly with knowledge management. Its relevance to information management would be indirect and is not clarified within the work (without indulging in a valueless antagonism between information and knowledge management). A reference librarian might insist that attributing the phrase, “All for one and one for all”, to the Scarlet Pimpernel (p. 152) rather than to d'Artagnan and the three musketeers, although broadly politically congruent, is inaccurate. The work promises a theoretical approach but this promise is not fulfilled.

Knowledge management is clearly highly significant, with potentially recoverable intellectual antecedents. Bacon's aphorism, Knowledge is power, is most often, although not exclusively (Babbage, 1963, p. 388), read with reference to an individual's knowledge, but a contextual reading indicates that the social intellect and the role of science in enhancing control over the natural environment is intended. Johnson, inescapably influenced by Bacon, reflected on the relation between social knowledge and political power in Rasselas:

By what means, said the prince, are the Europeans thus powerful? or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither. They are more powerful, Sir, than we, answered Imlac, because they are wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance, as man governs the other animals (Johnson, 1968, pp. 28‐9).

The concept of the social intellect is most fully developed in Marx and technology understood as:

… organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it (Marx, 1973, p. 706).

The Marxian understanding of technology has been developed to encompass information technology (Warner, 2000). The historical development of the social intellect would be relevant to the discussion of the manufacture of complex goods (p. 134), but the connection is not made.

The significance of the topic is not, then, matched by its treatment. There is the familiar failure in discussions of management to differentiate observation and understanding from prescription. Established practices may embody an understanding of knowledge and these could be studied. Within information science, there have been productive attempts to differentiate knowledge from information (Blair, 2002). The slogan quoted from Honda is sympathetic, ‘All engineers are equal in the presence of technology’ (p. 219).

In conclusion, the relation of knowledge and knowledge management to human or even organisational welfare is not greatly elucidated. We may have to fall back on Johnson's conclusion:

They are surely happy, said the prince, who have all these conveniences … The Europeans, answered Imlac, are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed (Johnson, 1968, p. 31).