Paul Hildreth's

Research Details

 
Paul's research is concerned with knowledge which cannot be captured, codified and stored, and the management of this knowledge in the distributed international environment.

It is only recently that attention has been paid to the management of this knowledge which cannot be captured, codified and stored.  Its management is proving to be problematic, resulting in many attempts to describe and define this knowledge.  Most of these definitions regard knowledge as being made up of opposites, for example explicit-tacit.  Most of these definitions are still being drawn from the representationist viewpoint and are attempting to manage this knowledge by making it into a form where it can be captured, codified and stored in the usual manner.  They fail to take into account the constructionist viewpoint. The many and varied definitions are interesting but inconsistent. Therefore it is proposed to use the terms soft and hard knowledge as a working definition for the research.

Hard knowledge is the knowledge which is easily captured codified and stored.  This knowledge is the knowledge which has generally been tackled in KM.  Soft knowledge is the knowledge which cannot be captured and which is posing a problem for KM.  Therefore soft knowledge is explored in more detail in the thesis by using three ‘views’ where knowledge is a key component of work – Common Ground, the theory of Distributed Cognition (and Boundary Objects) and Communities of Practice (CoPs).  What becomes clear is that it is problematic to try and tackle soft knowledge in isolation and that hard knowledge is also needed.  Thus it is argued that knowledge should not be regarded as a set of opposites but as a duality with all knowledge being both hard and soft, simply with differing proportions.  Viewing knowledge through this lens provides an explanation for the failure of some KM systems. In order to be successful a KM system will have to take into account both the softer and harder aspects of knowledge.   Something similar was found in Wenger (1998) in his recent work on CoPs where he emphasised the duality of participation and reification which mapped closely with the soft/hard duality.  However, Wenger’s work did not show how this would work in a distributed environment.  Therefore in order to explore the management of soft knowledge in a distributed environment it was decided to explore the problem by:

Three main points arose from the case studies:
  1. The structure of a distributed organisational CoP is not totally distributed but has co-located ‘active’ cores
  2. The research showed the importance of shared artefacts in co-ordinating the work of the CoP
  3. The case studies also demonstrated the importance of social issues, in particular the development of strong working relationships.
The research raises a number of implications for KM. It has shown that CoPs can exist in a distributed environment.  The work has taken the theory of Communities of Practice and extended it by exploring a CoP in a distributed international environment.  The research provides a detailed insight into the inner workings of a CoP and how the CoP is sustained. It showed the importance of shared artefacts in sustaining the community, however it was not the artefact per se which was important but the participation which it facilitated.  It also showed how the sustaining of the CoP is essentially about friendship and other social relations rather than about knowledge.  This raises the questions of how such things are managed.  Clearly they are not managed in the way KM as a discipline considers management.  Examining the CoP shows how central participants nurture these friendships.  This is essentially a human activity at the level of practice, not at the level of the organisation or technology. The development of the strong working relationships into friendships was a key aspect of the main case study and showed that the capture-codify-store aspect of KM is not really relevant. Rather, what we can see at the heart of a CoP is the development of friendships and trust, in which case the emphasis is no longer on managing knowledge but about the human aspects of that process which takes us even further from the capture-codify-store approach. Social issues such as close working relationships, friendships, identity, trust and confidence, members going’ the extra half mile’ for each other in order to make the CoP work were shown to be very important.  This indicates that, rather than exploring the organisation in terms of where information is and how it flows (as in a capture-codify-store approach), it is important to look at where the social relationships and networks are and how they can be supported. The organisation needs to be regarded as adaptive rather than in terms of a flow of information.  In short we should seek to put the people back into KM. This is not a retrograde step, for humans are cleverer than computers – humans have the softer aspects of the knowledge, too.

This research was undertaken as part of the work for the degree of DPhil.  The thesis abstract is available for reference.
 
 

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last updated: April 11th 2001