The loss of knowledge and the need to share knowledge across different locations has led to an increased awareness of the importance of knowledge as an important resource and organisations are taking steps to manage it. Knowledge Management (KM) is an approach which claims to deal with this, however a lot of Knowledge Management deals with explicit knowledge and emphasises a capture, codify, store approach. This is a major weakness of the current approach to KM as a large part of it appears to equate more with Information Management. It is only very recently that the importance of more subtle types of knowledge which need sharing has been recognised and explored. Sharing such knowledge in a distributed environment has received even less attention and there is a need for new ways of thinking about how knowledge is shared in distributed groups.
The research described in this dissertation moves away from regarding knowledge as opposites (for example structured/unstructured), preferring to regard knowledge as a soft/hard duality where all knowledge is both soft and hard. It is simply the proportions which differ. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) Communities of Practice (CoPs) are identified as providing an environment which supports the sharing of the softer kinds of knowledge. CoPs, however, are generally co-located but the pressures of globalisation are leading to an increasing need to share knowledge in a physically distributed environment. The research therefore explores how CoPs might function in such an environment.
The study is organised in three stages. The first is an exploration of the literature which explains the weaknesses of current KM approaches and introduces the notion of the soft/hard knowledge duality. The softer side of knowledge is examined from the point of view of Common Ground (Clark 1996), the theory of Distributed Cognition (Hutchins 1995a), Boundary Objects (Star 1989) and CoPs. CoPs are identified as groups in which soft knowledge is created, sustained and nurtured. Part Two is a preliminary study which attempts to ascertain whether CoPs can exist in a distributed environment. The final part is an in depth study of the interactions and work of a distributed international CoP.
The contribution of the research lies in its support for KM practitioners
and researchers by exploring how the softer aspects of knowledge can be
shared in a physically distributed environment. This is done by extending
Lave and Wenger’s (1991, Wenger 1998) theory of Communities of Practice
by applying them to a distributed international environment.