Knowledge Management Foundations

by Fuller

• ISBN13: 9780750673655
• ISBN10: 0750673656
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-10
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

'Knowledge Management Foundations' is just what it claims, the first attempt to provide a secure intellectual footing for the myriad of practices called "knowledge management." 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. this ground-breaking book will prove of interest to both academics and practitioners of knowledge management. It highlights the ways in which KM has challenged the values associated with knowledge that academics have taken for granted for centuries. At the same time, Fuller resists the conclusion of many KM gurus, that the value of knowledge lies in whatever the market will bear in the short term. He pays special attention to how information technology has not only facilitated knowledge work but also has radically altered its nature. There are chapters devoted to the revolution in intellectual property and an evaluation of peer review as a quality control mechanism. The book culminates in a positive re-evaluation of universities as knowledge producing institutions from which the corporate sector still has much to learn.

Author Biography

Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, England, and a founding member of Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI)

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. ix
What Knowledge Management Has Managed to Do to Knowledge	p. 1
Much Ado about Knowledge: Why Now?	p. 2
Historical Myopia as a Precondition for Knowledge Management	p. 5
What's in a Name?: "Knowledge Management,"	p. 12
Knowledge and Information: The Great Bait and Switch	p. 16
The Scientist: KM's Enemy Number One?	p. 20
The KM Challenge to Knowledge in Theory and Practice	p. 23
KM and the End of Knowledge in Theory: The Deconstruction of Public Goods	p. 23
KM and the End of Knowledge in Practice: The Disintegration of the University	p. 30
Back to Basics: Rediscovering the Value of Knowledge in Rent, Wage, Profit	p. 36
The Epistemic Empire Strikes Back: Metapublic Goods and the Injection of Academic Values into Corporate Enterprise	p. 44
Squaring the KM Circle: Who's Afraid of Accelerating the Production of New Knowledge?	p. 49
Making Knowledge Matter: Philosophy, Economics, and Law	p. 57
The Basic Philosophical Obstacle to Knowledge Management	p. 58
The Philosophical Problem of Knowledge and Its Problems	p. 61
The Creation of Knowledge Markets: The Idea of an Epistemic Exchange Rate	p. 67
An Offer No Scientist Can Refuse: Why Scientists Share	p. 72
Materializing the Marketplace of Ideas: Is Possessing Knowledge Like Possessing Money?	p. 75
Intellectual Property as the Nexus of Epistemic Validity and Economic Value	p. 81
The Challenges Posed by Dividing the Indivisible	p. 82
The Challenges Posed by Inventing the Discovered	p. 88
Interlude: Is the Knowledge Market Saturated or Depressed?: Do We Know Too Much or Too Little?	p. 93
Recapitulation: From Disciplines and Professions to Intellectual Property Law	p. 96
The Legal Epistemology of Intellectual Property	p. 98
Two Strategies for Studying the Proprietary Grounds of Knowledge	p. 105
Epilogue: Alienating Knowledge from the Knower and the Commodification of Expertise	p. 106
Information Technology as the Key to the Knowledge Revolution	p. 116
Introduction: From Epistemology to Information Technology	p. 117
The Post-Industrial Dream: The Intellectualization of Information Technology	p. 125
Society's Shifting Human-Computer Interface: An Historical Overview	p. 137
From Expertise to Expert Systems	p. 143
A Brief Social History of Expertise	p. 143
How Knowledge Engineers Benefit from the Social Character of Expertise	p. 145
The Lessons of Expert Systems for the Sociology of Knowledge Systems	p. 151
Expert Systems and the Pseudo-Democratization of Expertise	p. 154
Recapitulation: Expertise as the Ultimate Subject of Intellectual Property	p. 161
Why Even Scholars Don't Get a Free Lunch in Cyberspace	p. 167
A Tale of Two Technophilosophies: Cyberplatonism versus Cybermaterialism	p. 169
The Publishing Industry as the Cyberscapegoat	p. 174
Adding Some Resistance to the Frictionless Medium of Thought	p. 178
Why Paperlessness Is No Panacea	p. 183
Does Cyberspace "Deserve" Peer Review?	p. 187
Conclusion: Purifying Cyberplatonism's Motives	p. 189
Postscript: Capitalized Education as the Ultimate Information Technology	p. 191
A Civic Republican Theory of Knowledge Management	p. 196
The Historical and Philosophical Bases of Civic Republicanism	p. 197
A Distinguished False Lead: Michael Polanyi's "Republic of Science"	p. 203
In Search of Republican Vehicles for Knowledge Management	p. 211
Knowledge Worker Unions	p. 212
Consensus Conferences	p. 213
Universities: The Ultimate Republican Institution	p. 216
Historic Threats to the Republican Constitution of the University	p. 220
The Challenge of Contract Academic Workers to the University's Republican Constitution	p. 225
Conclusion: A Civic Republican Agenda for the Academic CEO of Tomorrow	p. 229
What's Living and Dead in Peer-Review Processes?	p. 232
Introduction: The Scope of Peer Review	p. 232
Defining Peers	p. 235
Recruiting Peers	p. 238
Systematically Recording Peer Judgments	p. 241
Ethically Monitoring Peer Judgments	p. 242
"Extended Peer Review": The Universal Solvent?	p. 245
Does Peer Review Have a Future? Implications for Research and Policy	p. 248
Methodological Note	p. 251
Conclusion: The Mixed Root Metaphor of Knowledge Management	p. 252
References	p. 254
Index	p. 270
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.