I decided to analyze exclusively research articles this week. All three pieces selected (Chua's "A Tale of Two Hurricanes," Ibrahim and Allen's "Information Sharing and Trust During Major Incidents," and Wong and Lu's "Knowledge Transfer in Response to Organizational Crises") deal with information sharing during times of crisis.
What I learned from these articles is that information sharing is incredibly important during crises; what differentiated the responses to hurricanes Katrina and Rita was the proper implementation of knowledge shared early in the preparations for the hurricanes. Wong and Lu took the same lesson to business organizations-- essentially, in order for any community, whether it is a company or an entire state, to survive any crisis, whether one of business or a cataclysmic event, it is necessary for people to transfer critical knowledge to the people who will need it.
Ibrahim and Allen took that concept and then turned on its head the underlying assumption that trust is an important element in the pre-information-sharing relationship. Instead, their research shoes that sharing information helps build trust between unknown entities. Their research focused on a high-stakes fast-paced scenario (offshore oil crises), and found that trust could quickly be repaired or rebuilt by mutual sharing of information. This makes sense to me in many ways-- it's a show of good faith, for one-- and yet also seems radical and interesting.
This prevents situations like my classmate Lisa feeling left out of the conversation. It even has applications via social media technology, which can be used to transfer knowledge quickly and easily in a variety of channels (which I intend to explore more fully in my next post). And, in the case of Hurricane Rita, it prevents massive loss of life and property.
~*~
Readings discussed
Chua, A. Y. K. (2007). A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a knowledge management perspective. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 58(10), 1518-1528. doi:10.1002/asi.20640
Ibrahim, N. H., & Allen, D. (2012). Information sharing and trust during major incidents: Findings from the oil industry. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 63(10), 1916-1928. doi:10.1002/asi.22676
Wang, W. T., & Lu, Y. C. (2010). Knowledge transfer in response to organizational crises: An exploratory study. Expert Systems with Applications, 37(5), 3934-3942. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.11.023
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration
As a jumping-off point for this round of investigation, I went in search my blogs by my classmates. In keeping with my fledgling investigations into knowledge flow through communities, I decided to use their idea to help inspire me in reading selection and topics of discussion for this post.
I began with this post by my classmate Whitney, which tackles a truly titanic amount of reading for one post. Her endorsement of the Hara book "Communities of Practice" told me that now was as good a time as ever for reading it, so before I discuss anything Whitney went into detail on, I'm going to stop and do Hara for a minute.
As Hara defines it, a "community of practice" is a collaborative but informal network that supports professional practitioners in their efforts to develop shared understandings and engage in work-relevant knowledge building. The idea of a shared understasnding is at the core of all the readings I've done on knowledge management thus far, as well as in several other courses I've taken in my LIS program. It is important in a particularly concrete way in terms of professionals in a shared field, because they must deal with knowledge in ways that are specific to their profession, which must make sense in their contexts to be usable, but may not apply outside their field. (This has come up in my catagloging class with the concept of the "shared vocabulary.")
Some of this shared understanding is serendipitous or inherent; these are people who already share a lot of thought processes and knowledge in common in order to work in their shared profession of choice. However, as no two brains work precisely the same, this still requires careful coordination to eliminate ambiguity and make communication as smooth as possible. This can even help with the transfer of invisible or tacit knowledge, as described by the lawyers who simply "know" what a judge's facial expressions mean for their clients and which jurors will be good choices for a jury.
This gave me an extra framework when discussing another of the pieces referred to by Whitney, the Grace article "Wikis as a knowledge management tool." While wikis are often thought of as decidedly unprofessional because they are tended to by the public rather than information professionals, they may very well be curated by the people who know most about the material. Wikis, collaboration, and the democracy and utility of public sharing have always been topics that are very interesting to me, and I was excited to read Grace's piece.
As Whitney said, Grace's piece is relatively straightforward and practical (although perhaps a bit technical for me close to the beginning). It discusses bringing wiki techology to professional systems to help organize knowledge efficiently between individuals and within systems, independent of formal training. This seems a natural extension of the community of practice into the digital sphere, and I am glad of it. While wikis present challenges-- without the authority of a formal trainer, control of the shared understanding becomes a bit shadier and more reliant on group policing-- I think it speaks to a concept brought up in one of the articles I discussed in my last post: that a decentralization of power is somewhat necessary for efficient information-sharing.
Now I get to feature another of my classmates, because I'll be referring to this post by Darra. (Is it recursive to refer to a post that refers back to my blog? Yes. Am I doing it anyway? Yes.) Darra also touches on Hara and group knowledge, and you should definitely go check it out. Particularly inspirational to me was the bit about a law degree being insufficient to practice law, and needing a community to be able to apply even the formal schooling, which really helped me contextualize Hara's points.
Darra's points on the Cook and Brown article "Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between oganizational knowledge and organizational knowing" are what I really want to get to. Darra reports having struggled with this reading (which is kind of a natural reaction to it), but she unpacks one of its ideas really beautifully and inspired me to pursue the thread myself.
Cook and Brown touch on an idea I've seen outlined as the difference between knowledge as data versus knowledge as process. They use different terms, referring instead to knowledge possessed by individuals and knowledge practiced by groups, but I think the concepts are related. Cook and Brown argue that what the typically think of as "knowledge" is the provision of the individual rather than groups, but that this is a limiting way of thinking. Knowledge as a possession of individuals isn't very useful in the context of this class, unless that individual chooses to share that information (say, on a wiki as discussed by Grace) and allow it to transmute itself into group practice. This would make it utile to a community of practitioners and subject to the kinds of forces described in Hara's book, which brings this blog post full circle and ties these concepts together far better than I would have hoped.
Onward and upwards!
~*~
Readings discussed:
Hara, N. (2009). Communities of practice: Fostering peer-to-peer learning and informal knowledge sharing in the work place. Information Science and Knowledge Management (Vol. 13). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Cook, S. D. N., & Brown, J. S. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization science, 10(4), 381-400. doi:10.1287/orsc.10.4.381
Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 64-74. doi:10.1108/13673270910971833
I began with this post by my classmate Whitney, which tackles a truly titanic amount of reading for one post. Her endorsement of the Hara book "Communities of Practice" told me that now was as good a time as ever for reading it, so before I discuss anything Whitney went into detail on, I'm going to stop and do Hara for a minute.
As Hara defines it, a "community of practice" is a collaborative but informal network that supports professional practitioners in their efforts to develop shared understandings and engage in work-relevant knowledge building. The idea of a shared understasnding is at the core of all the readings I've done on knowledge management thus far, as well as in several other courses I've taken in my LIS program. It is important in a particularly concrete way in terms of professionals in a shared field, because they must deal with knowledge in ways that are specific to their profession, which must make sense in their contexts to be usable, but may not apply outside their field. (This has come up in my catagloging class with the concept of the "shared vocabulary.")
Some of this shared understanding is serendipitous or inherent; these are people who already share a lot of thought processes and knowledge in common in order to work in their shared profession of choice. However, as no two brains work precisely the same, this still requires careful coordination to eliminate ambiguity and make communication as smooth as possible. This can even help with the transfer of invisible or tacit knowledge, as described by the lawyers who simply "know" what a judge's facial expressions mean for their clients and which jurors will be good choices for a jury.
This gave me an extra framework when discussing another of the pieces referred to by Whitney, the Grace article "Wikis as a knowledge management tool." While wikis are often thought of as decidedly unprofessional because they are tended to by the public rather than information professionals, they may very well be curated by the people who know most about the material. Wikis, collaboration, and the democracy and utility of public sharing have always been topics that are very interesting to me, and I was excited to read Grace's piece.
As Whitney said, Grace's piece is relatively straightforward and practical (although perhaps a bit technical for me close to the beginning). It discusses bringing wiki techology to professional systems to help organize knowledge efficiently between individuals and within systems, independent of formal training. This seems a natural extension of the community of practice into the digital sphere, and I am glad of it. While wikis present challenges-- without the authority of a formal trainer, control of the shared understanding becomes a bit shadier and more reliant on group policing-- I think it speaks to a concept brought up in one of the articles I discussed in my last post: that a decentralization of power is somewhat necessary for efficient information-sharing.
Now I get to feature another of my classmates, because I'll be referring to this post by Darra. (Is it recursive to refer to a post that refers back to my blog? Yes. Am I doing it anyway? Yes.) Darra also touches on Hara and group knowledge, and you should definitely go check it out. Particularly inspirational to me was the bit about a law degree being insufficient to practice law, and needing a community to be able to apply even the formal schooling, which really helped me contextualize Hara's points.
Darra's points on the Cook and Brown article "Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between oganizational knowledge and organizational knowing" are what I really want to get to. Darra reports having struggled with this reading (which is kind of a natural reaction to it), but she unpacks one of its ideas really beautifully and inspired me to pursue the thread myself.
Cook and Brown touch on an idea I've seen outlined as the difference between knowledge as data versus knowledge as process. They use different terms, referring instead to knowledge possessed by individuals and knowledge practiced by groups, but I think the concepts are related. Cook and Brown argue that what the typically think of as "knowledge" is the provision of the individual rather than groups, but that this is a limiting way of thinking. Knowledge as a possession of individuals isn't very useful in the context of this class, unless that individual chooses to share that information (say, on a wiki as discussed by Grace) and allow it to transmute itself into group practice. This would make it utile to a community of practitioners and subject to the kinds of forces described in Hara's book, which brings this blog post full circle and ties these concepts together far better than I would have hoped.
Onward and upwards!
~*~
Readings discussed:
Hara, N. (2009). Communities of practice: Fostering peer-to-peer learning and informal knowledge sharing in the work place. Information Science and Knowledge Management (Vol. 13). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Cook, S. D. N., & Brown, J. S. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization science, 10(4), 381-400. doi:10.1287/orsc.10.4.381
Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 64-74. doi:10.1108/13673270910971833
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Lost direction
I had been trying to write this post for several days without success before I finally got started . It seems that without a clearly-organized reading schedule or prompts I become timid about finding new topics to explore. For the last post, I had a jumping-off point (Polanyi) and I used it to pick two other articles I could tell based on their titles dealt with similar ideas. For this one, I dillied over the reading list, but when making an informed decision began to seem impossible, I bit the bullet and selected three of the articles more or less at random for this post. So this is an explorative adventure for all of us, and not just for you (readers). We'll see how it goes.
The first piece I chose to read, "The Once and Future Information Society," provided an interesting framework for my consideration of future readings and concepts, so it worked out a bit serendipitously that I chose to tackle it so close to the beginning of this project. Its authors (Rule and Besen) posit that a concept exists amongst intellectuals that information and its methods of being shared have (are? will?) changed (changing? change?) social history. While there is no doubt that the ways in which society handles and accesses information (and the kinds of information to which society has access), Rule and Besen question the assumption that this is drastically overhauling society-- in terms of economy, politics, and all.
The "information society" described in the article is a flattering but somewhat nebulous concept. The changes attributed to it by information theorists are bold and somewhat spurious (particularly the Drucker assumption, originally published in 1968 and allegedly reiterated by subsequent authors on the subject, that our society is "post-capitalist"-- maybe my view is skewed by the SuperBowl advertisements, but I think I would have to squint pretty hard to lose sight of capitalism's supposedly invisible hand in our culture). My take on this concept links nicely to the central argument described by Daneshgar and Parirokh and explained in this blog post by my professor Dr. Burns-- knowledge is a commodity. While capitalism may look different now than it did before the advent of technology changed the ways in which we engage with information, by now even information has been incorporated into the capitalist framework. We trade in it as easily as we trade in more traditional forms of currency, and many see an exchange rate between the two. (Saint Simon and other information theorists, as detailed by Rule and Besen, consider it a focal point of information society that information has increased economic value, calling into question exactly what Drucker may have meant by his curious phrasing.)
The first piece I chose to read, "The Once and Future Information Society," provided an interesting framework for my consideration of future readings and concepts, so it worked out a bit serendipitously that I chose to tackle it so close to the beginning of this project. Its authors (Rule and Besen) posit that a concept exists amongst intellectuals that information and its methods of being shared have (are? will?) changed (changing? change?) social history. While there is no doubt that the ways in which society handles and accesses information (and the kinds of information to which society has access), Rule and Besen question the assumption that this is drastically overhauling society-- in terms of economy, politics, and all.
The "information society" described in the article is a flattering but somewhat nebulous concept. The changes attributed to it by information theorists are bold and somewhat spurious (particularly the Drucker assumption, originally published in 1968 and allegedly reiterated by subsequent authors on the subject, that our society is "post-capitalist"-- maybe my view is skewed by the SuperBowl advertisements, but I think I would have to squint pretty hard to lose sight of capitalism's supposedly invisible hand in our culture). My take on this concept links nicely to the central argument described by Daneshgar and Parirokh and explained in this blog post by my professor Dr. Burns-- knowledge is a commodity. While capitalism may look different now than it did before the advent of technology changed the ways in which we engage with information, by now even information has been incorporated into the capitalist framework. We trade in it as easily as we trade in more traditional forms of currency, and many see an exchange rate between the two. (Saint Simon and other information theorists, as detailed by Rule and Besen, consider it a focal point of information society that information has increased economic value, calling into question exactly what Drucker may have meant by his curious phrasing.)
Because of the vagueness of the definitions of the terms involved, it's difficult to estimate the exact effects this has had on the economy and society as a whole. Rule and Besen point to outlandish optimism and egoism on the part of intellectuals who have asserted that the "information society" has had a large and lasting effect. One interesting part of the debate is whether we ought to classify "theoretical knowledge" separately from "practical knowledge," but this gets messy when the distinction between the two breaks down, as it does each time a new stride forward is taken and more and more theoretical knowledge becomes practically applicable.
The takeways from this piece are that 1) education is important for the possibility of success in this age, but 2) it is still no guarantee thereof, particularly in cases where a system is already in place. Individuals have a greater chance of socioeconomic advancement with access to information, but information does not necessarily assist the masses in their struggle toward social justice. Information has been weaponized with the advent of expert witnesses, and there are in some ways more traps to fall into than ever. The idyllic "information society" playfully referenced in the title is not all it's cracked up to be-- and the article cautions against investing in its fantasy.
The next reading I chose was Duguid and Brown's "Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation." This article examines the ways information moves through organizations. Duguid and Brown look, instead of vaguely-defined "society," at organizations, which are thought of as more mechanical and precise. I see a connection to the Rule and Besen piece discussed above-- serendipity, again-- because one of the main points this article makes is that excellent and potentially very useful information can come to light through work, but if it originates in the wrong part of the system, it may never be shared equitably and help the betterment of the entire organization. This sounds a lot like Rule and Besen's cautioning against overoptimism on the part of intellectuals who favor the term "information society."
Unlike Rule and Besen, who simply wished to point out the pitfalls of a way of thinking, Duguid and Brown provide a solution to this problem. They say that in order for organizations to best utilize the information provided by their members, they need to first acknowledge those members as individuals capable of innovative thought. This will allow organizations to reevaluate their standard practices and help allow for creative problem-solving rather than rote sticking to a formula provided by the organization.
The final piece I am looking at this week is Frank Blackler's "Knowledge, Knowledge Work, and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation." The theorists Blackler reviews seem to call back to the material I engaged with last week, about knowledge and what it is. Again the answer is indefinable and, the article suggests, attempts to define it restrict it too much to make it useful. Knowledge lives in the dynamic space between people and their communities, and we have not yet invented a way to talk about it concretely. It changes constantly and cannot be pinned down.
Then, however, Blackler diverts to a course that runs closely to the Rule and Besen piece. This is to discuss "knowledge work," which is a way of talking about the commodification of knowledge and the ways knowledge fits into the capitalist infrastructure. Blackler contends that the central issue in knowledge work is how to respond to the changes in information systems (in both structure and action). The ways in which organizations interact with information are changing, and the ways they weather those changes are going to dictate how successful they are in this informational-capitalist economy.
~*~
Readings discussed:
Rule, J. B., & Besen, Yasemin. (2008). The once and future information society. Theory and Society, 37(4), 317-342. doi:10.1007/s11186-007-9049-6
Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation. Organization Science, 2(1), 40-57. doi:10.1287/orsc.2.1.40
Blackler, F. (1995). Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: An overview and interpretation. Organization Studies, 16(6), 1021-1046. doi:10.1177/017084069501600605
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