Knowledge Management Book Review

Abstract
Knowledge management was advanced in the early 1990’s as a new managerial reform suited to the rapidly changing and globally vast business environment. These reformers encouraged managers to treat as a critical source their employees’ knowledge, of which they themselves had minimally articulated and varying conceptions. The major common feature among these conceptions was their generally cognitive, epistemological, and often individualistic approach to the question of knowledge, which dispossesses them of other important issues, most notably “power.” Adopting a sociological approach in this paper, will reexamine issues of Knowledge management, especially as they relate to power relationships inside and outside organizations. We apply a refined version of Foucault’s notion of a “regime of truth” to show the institutionally-specific processes, procedures, and mechanisms that are usually at work in the creation of statements about the social world that function as true. As examples, we distinguish three regimes of truth that, we argue, are at work in the functioning of publicly traded businesses in the U.S. — the financial reporting, analysts’ research, and business press regimes of truth. A brief look at knowledge-management literature will further manifest a fourth regime of scholarly research. The close examination of these multiple regimes will lead us to the overall conclusion that power relationships can systematically influence the statements about the social world that function as true. In the latter part of the paper, we will study the implications of this observation for the theory and practice of knowledge management.


Introduction
The second half of the twentieth century is often characterized as times of great social and political uncertainty, rapid economical change, globalization, and hypercompetitive business environments. Under such circumstances, it is suggested, knowledge turns into the most important means of production (hence, the “knowledge society” and “knowledge economy”) and a strategic resource of the firm (hence, the “knowledge organization), which should be maintained, processed, integrated, disseminated, and shared (hence, “knowledge management”) by a new generation of competent workers who are trained and technically equipped for this very purpose (hence, “knowledge workers). The concept of knowledge, often in association with such other terms as “innovation,” “competency,” “flexibility,” and “competitive advantage,” has thus become a central concept in discussions of late modern times.

In the early and mid-1990s, a new managerial reform was advanced by a number of consultants and some academics -- knowledge management. Knowledge management has several roots -- including the conception of certain technical and professional occupations as knowledge workers, the growing discourses about information societies and even knowledge societies, and last, the claims of some computer scientists to develop “knowledge based information systems.” What is often missing from such discussions and discourses, however, is the close relation between “knowledge” and “power” as social processes that create and constrain each other in intricate ways. Except for cryptic allusions to the Hobbesian dictum that “Knowledge is power,” therefore, one hardly sees a coherent analysis of the above relation in discussions of knowledge economy, in general, and of knowledge management, in particular. And the Hobbesian dictum, as many have argued, is not only an outdated cliché for our times (e.g., Harraway 1991), it provides, as we shall argue, a lopsided view of the relation between power and knowledge, somehow sweeping its significance under the rug.

The purpose of this article is to examine how power relations, apply  to the theory and practice of knowledge management in modern organizations. The article continues in the next section with a brief review of the prevalent conceptions of knowledge management. We then apply a refined version of Michel Foucault’s notion of a “regime of truth” to introduce three regimes that are involved in the functioning of publicly traded companies.  Building on a study by Schultze and Leidner (2002) and a bried examination of business literature in the 1990’s, we further propose a regime of scholarly research. Our main conclusion is that power relationships play important roles in helping to understand some of the limits of what kinds of knowledge professionals with share with others,  these power relationships have not been integrated into theories of knowledge managemnt.. We will discuss the implications of this conclusion for the current theory and practice of knowledge management.     
to be continued

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