Knowledge Management in Practice: A Special Issue

Abstract

Organizations of different kinds, from structured companies up to social networks or virtual communities, are becoming increasingly aware of the need to collect, organize, mobilize, and increase the expertise and knowledge which characterize their ability to stay alive, adapt, and evolve in a turbulent context. Knowledge Management (KM) is the current term for the different organizational and technological approaches to answer this need. KM, from a management perspective, is an attempt to rationalize and manage the vast amounts of formal and informal knowledge that any organization, especially large companies, has. KM, from a practice perspective, investigates the everyday practices that lead to organizationally situated use of that formal and informal knowledge (Ackerman et al. 2008). While the KM discourse has long been focusing on opportunities to externalize and represent knowledge in artifacts, the identification of knowledgeable actors and the support of social networks as well as their interactions with artifact becomes highly relevant in a practice perspective (Ackerman et al. 2003). CSCW has examined knowledge and information in organizations from its very beginnings. In more recent years, the CSCW community has examined KM per se. This manifested itself in asking for applied research in the KM practices of real organizations instead of blindly following media hype—the critical realism stance that Robert Kling advocated over the technological utopianism of the media and technology promoters. In addition, the KM investigation in CSCW has followed CSCW’s notable interest in discussing and detailing the interrelationships between technological and organizational innovations, and CSCWas a community has taken on the task of considering those interrelationships critically. This views KM largely as a matter of socio-technical design—and a difficult design problem at that. This special issue adheres to these positions. Our aim was to collect articles reporting on knowledge management in action. We wanted to further the discussion of the issues of KM through the kinds of fine-grained ethnography-based investigations found in this community and this journal. Specifically, we wanted ethnography-based or other interpretivist work that confronted and learned from real organizational situations. We wanted these papers to highlight the problems, requirements, tradeoffs, and technical solutions in KM that can be derived only from field-based research.