THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY: SOME EVIDENCES FROM ITALY AND SERBIA

Abstract

Knowledge, over time, has assumed a central role in society. Today, in fact, it represents one of the main resources that can determine the competitive success of companies, facilitating the identification of a lasting "competitive advantage" (Calabi et al. 2015). First of all, it is necessary to make some clarifications, specifying what is meant by knowledge and then to understand what reality is. Knowledge and reality are linked and therefore cannot be separated. In fact, in order to know what reality is, we must know it and, therefore, know what knowledge is; moreover, individuals only want to know what is real (Lundvall, 2016). Consumer knowledge is and has been studied in a wide range of areas, in fact providing a synthetic definition of knowledge is not at all simple. The importance of knowledge in modern economies has found expression in the term "Knowledge Economy" (Tronti, 2015). The definition of Knowledge has taken on various interpretations. According to Davenport, knowledge "is a fluid combination of experience, values, contextual information and specialist expertise that provides a framework for the evaluation and assimilation of new experience and information. It originates and is applied through the connoisseurs. In organisations, knowledge is linked not only to documents, but also to organisational procedures and processes, practices and standards" (Davenport, Prusak, 2000, pp. 6-7). Knowledge is born from the interaction of more information between them and from the comparison with knowledge already acquired. Therefore, they are data organized and presented within a context. Depending on the degree of accessibility, knowledge can be divided into: Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (Fontana, Lorenzoni, 2004). The first typology can be explicit, defined as tacit because of the lack of incentives, while the second cannot be explicit, because it is tacit by nature (Cowan et al. 2000). Specifically, 'tacit knowledge' means all the knowledge that the human mind possesses and uses to guide actions and behaviours, but that it is not able to express, or can express with great effort, on particular occasions, and in any case in a nebulous and partial way (Marradi, 2003). It develops within the minds of individuals, in fact it is personal and as such is difficult to formalize and communicate. Explicit Knowledge, on the other hand, is objective and rational, in the sense that it is "codified", and can be expressed through a systematic language. The most important study on this difference was conducted by Polanyi, according to whom individuals know much more than they can relate and articulate. Knowledge, which can be expressed in words and numbers, represents only "the tip of the iceberg of the overall body of knowledge" (Polanyi, 1979). So if the tip of the iceberg is explicit knowledge, the body of the iceberg is tacit knowledge.