Knowledge management foundations / Steve Fuller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fuller, Steve.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Knowledge management.

Physical Description:

xi, 279 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

[Hartland Four Corners, Vt] : KMCI Press ; Boston : Butterworth-Heinemann, [2002]

Summary:

Knowledge Management Foundations is just what it claims, the first attempt to provide a secure intellectual footing for the myriad practices called "knowledge management" (KM). A breath of fresh air from the usual KM gurus, Fuller openly admits that the advent of KM is a mixed blessing that often amounts to the conduct of traditional management by subtler means. However, Fuller's deep understanding of both the history of management theory and knowledge production more generally enables him to separate the wheat from the chaff of the KM literature. Ending with a positive re-evaluation of universities as knowledge producing institutions from which the corporate sector still has much to learn, this groundbreaking book will be of interest to both KM academics and practitioners.

Contents:

1 What Knowledge Management Has Managed to Do to Knowledge 1

1. Much Ado about Knowledge: Why Now? 2

1.1. Historical Myopia as a Precondition for Knowledge Management 5

1.2. What's in a Name?: "Knowledge Management," 12

2. Knowledge and Information: The Great Bait and Switch 16

3. The Scientist: KM's Enemy Number One? 20

4. The KM Challenge to Knowledge in Theory and Practice 23

4.1. KM and the End of Knowledge in Theory: The Deconstruction of Public Goods 23

4.2. KM and the End of Knowledge in Practice: The Disintegration of the University 30

5. Back to Basics: Rediscovering the Value of Knowledge in Rent, Wage, Profit 36

6. The Epistemic Empire Strikes Back: Metapublic Goods and the Injection of Academic Values into Corporate Enterprise 44

7. Squaring the KM Circle: Who's Afraid of Accelerating the Production of New Knowledge? 49

2 Making Knowledge Matter: Philosophy, Economics, and Law 57

1. The Basic Philosophical Obstacle to Knowledge Management 58

1.1. The Philosophical Problem of Knowledge and Its Problems 61

2. The Creation of Knowledge Markets: The Idea of an Epistemic Exchange Rate 67

2.1. An Offer No Scientist Can Refuse: Why Scientists Share 72

2.2. Materializing the Marketplace of Ideas: Is Possessing Knowledge Like Possessing Money? 75

3. Intellectual Property as the Nexus of Epistemic Validity and Economic Value 81

3.1. The Challenges Posed by Dividing the Indivisible 82

3.2. The Challenges Posed by Inventing the Discovered 88

4. Interlude: Is the Knowledge Market Saturated or Depressed?: Do We Know Too Much or Too Little? 93

5. Recapitulation: From Disciplines and Professions to Intellectual Property Law 96

6. The Legal Epistemology of Intellectual Property 98

6.1. Two Strategies for Studying the Proprietary Grounds of Knowledge 105

7. Epilogue: Alienating Knowledge from the Knower and the Commodification of Expertise 106

3 Information Technology as the Key to the Knowledge Revolution 116

1. Introduction: From Epistemology to Information Technology 117

2. The Post-Industrial Dream: The Intellectualization of Information Technology 125

3. Society's Shifting Human-Computer Interface: An Historical Overview 137

4. From Expertise to Expert Systems 143

4.1. A Brief Social History of Expertise 143

4.2. How Knowledge Engineers Benefit from the Social Character of Expertise 145

4.3. The Lessons of Expert Systems for the Sociology of Knowledge Systems 151

4.4. Expert Systems and the Pseudo-Democratization of Expertise 154

4.5. Recapitulation: Expertise as the Ultimate Subject of Intellectual Property 161

5. Why Even Scholars Don't Get a Free Lunch in Cyberspace 167

5.1. A Tale of Two Technophilosophies: Cyberplatonism versus Cybermaterialism 169

5.2. The Publishing Industry as the Cyberscapegoat 174

5.3. Adding Some Resistance to the Frictionless Medium of Thought 178

5.4. Why Paperlessness Is No Panacea 183

5.5. Does Cyberspace "Deserve" Peer Review? 187

5.6. Conclusion: Purifying Cyberplatonism's Motives 189

6. Postscript: Capitalized Education as the Ultimate Information Technology 191

4 A Civic Republican Theory of Knowledge Management 196

1. The Historical and Philosophical Bases of Civic Republicanism 197

2. A Distinguished False Lead: Michael Polanyi's "Republic of Science" 203

3. In Search of Republican Vehicles for Knowledge Management 211

3.1. Knowledge Worker Unions 212

3.2. Consensus Conferences 213

3.3. Universities: The Ultimate Republican Institution 216

4. Historic Threats to the Republican Constitution of the University 220

5. The Challenge of Contract Academic Workers to the University's Republican Constitution 225

6. Conclusion: A Civic Republican Agenda for the Academic CEO of Tomorrow 229

Appendix What's Living and Dead in Peer-Review Processes? 232

1. Introduction: The Scope of Peer Review 232

2. Defining Peers 235

3. Recruiting Peers 238

4. Systematically Recording Peer Judgments 241

5. Ethically Monitoring Peer Judgments 242

6. "Extended Peer Review": The Universal Solvent? 245

7. Does Peer Review Have a Future? Implications for Research and Policy 248

Conclusion: The Mixed Root Metaphor of Knowledge Management 252.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and (pages 254-269) index.

ISBN:

0750673656

OCLC:

48073637