After a hiatus of far too long (cliff's notes version: schoolwork, internship at Library of Congress, death in the family, more schoolwork), I return with another blog post. I returned to the tried-and-true method of choosing titles at random to read for this post, so I'm just going to have (completely blind) faith that they have anything in common worth talking about.
The first piece I looked at was Lam and Chua's case study on knowledge outsourcing. This article was rather obtuse and I had difficulty piecing it together, so please let me know if I missed anything important! Faculty members and members of the online courseware development team at Fenton University were interviewed to glean a rich picture of outsourcing in the online course community. Essentially, they found that people at one step in the process identify knowledge needs and then choose someone to provide knowledge to meet those needs. Then, if the knowledge provider is satisfied with the terms of the negotiation, the knowledge is delivered. This allows for a timely and quality learning process.
However, there are risks involved in knowledge outsourcing, including poor utilization by the client, may not meet the standards required, or being miscommunicated. This makes sense, because the ore steps are added to a process, the more opportunities there are to mess it up. However, since it is not feasible for one person-- or even one organization!-- to know everything, even everything they need to know, outsourcing still makes a lot of sense in the corporate world and in other situations.
Tremblay's piece, unfortunately, was similarly difficult for me to break down, but I'll take a stab at it nonetheless. It returns to the concept of the "information society" that I addressed in an earlier post. Like the earlier piece I discussed, Tremblay's article is skeptical verging on hostile toward the vague-yet-idealized notion of the "information society," and instead breaks down information exchange as a series of economic and social theories in practice. I would not say I enjoyed this article. It felt longer than it was, and I came away from it with a confused kind of pessimism. Tremblay asserts that no one knows where information technology is headed, but that people who have so far made predictions are most definitely wrong, because their pictures are too global and too simplistic.
Finally, I circled back to an article that discussed knowledge risks within organizations. Trkman and Desouza explored the dangers of sharing too much or two little. As Whitney and I discussed at this post of hers, collaboration and information sharing is a double-egded sword; while all parties share the benefits of shared information, all parties also share the risk or reprisal in the event of something going wrong. In an economic sense, there is also the risk of loss of competitive edge; if competitors have all the useful information your company has, you may no longer be able to beat them at doing what you both do.
This represents a take on knowledge sharing I hadn't thought of. I don't tend to think in these sorts of clearly-delineated capitalist ways, but I suppose it's rather obvious. Given that knowledge has an economic value (it can be sold, bartered, or even just leveraged for higher worth of its holder), it makes sense that it would also need to be controlled for the preservation of the capitalist market.
~*~
Readings discussed:
Lam, W., & Chua, A. Y. (2009). Knowledge outsourcing: An alternative strategy for knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(3), 28-43. doi:10.1108/13673270910962851
Tremblay, G. (1995). The information society: From Fordism to Gatesism. Canadian Journal of Communication, 20(4), 461-482. URL: http://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/891/797
Trkman, P., & Desouza, K.C. (2012). Knowledge risks in organizational networks: An exploratory framework. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 21(1), 1-17. doi:10.1016/j.jsis.2011.11.001.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Social Media and the Innovation of Organizations
I really enjoyed one of the articles I read for my last post, so I decided to begin with another by the same author. It relates to social media, which is a passion of mine, so I was quite excited to delve into it.
According to the paper, Starbucks uses social media in a variety of ways to disperse information, encourage active engagement, and even redefine the role of the consumer in the company. This has major implications for any service-based organization-- in order to form a positive association in the minds of consumers and gain their business, it helps to interact with them outside the physical store. Social media is a huge part of mainstream life now, and social networks are huge breeding grounds for unconventional information behaviors. Like any new technology, appropriate use of it can be immensely helpful to businesses.
After Chua, I moved on to something a little meatier. Nanahapiet discusses the idea of "social capital" as an agent for the creation and dispersal of "intellectual capital." Essentially, this means that within systems involving people working together, some people have higher status (formal and informal), and those people are more efficient innovators and more likely to have an audience within the system to share their innovations. In some ways, this is intuitive, but as models of human behavior go, it's admirably clean. This provides a handy illustration of the advantages of organizations-- free agents will neither produce the creativity of work as those well-situated in organizations nor have a mechanism in place to share their methods with others doing the same kind of work.
This led me nicely into the third article I chose to deal with today-- Nonaka's piece on organizational knowledge creation. This is the densest paper of the three for this post, but its argument boils down to the idea that proper use of organizations can help new knowledge grow and improve as it spreads. In this way, as above, knowledge creation is interactive and dependent on a larger community to thrive.
A few links of note: this Huffington Post article on tips for organizational work; my classmate Kelly's thoroughly entertaining post about social media and disaster; Rebecca's post which uses the same article to no less thoughtful and entertaining effect.
~*~
Readings Discussed:
Chua, A. Y. K., & Banerjee, S. (2013). Customer knowledge management via social media: The case of Starbucks. Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 17(2), 237-249. doi:10.1108/13673271311315196
Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. The Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266. URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/259373
Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1), 14-37. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2635068
According to the paper, Starbucks uses social media in a variety of ways to disperse information, encourage active engagement, and even redefine the role of the consumer in the company. This has major implications for any service-based organization-- in order to form a positive association in the minds of consumers and gain their business, it helps to interact with them outside the physical store. Social media is a huge part of mainstream life now, and social networks are huge breeding grounds for unconventional information behaviors. Like any new technology, appropriate use of it can be immensely helpful to businesses.
After Chua, I moved on to something a little meatier. Nanahapiet discusses the idea of "social capital" as an agent for the creation and dispersal of "intellectual capital." Essentially, this means that within systems involving people working together, some people have higher status (formal and informal), and those people are more efficient innovators and more likely to have an audience within the system to share their innovations. In some ways, this is intuitive, but as models of human behavior go, it's admirably clean. This provides a handy illustration of the advantages of organizations-- free agents will neither produce the creativity of work as those well-situated in organizations nor have a mechanism in place to share their methods with others doing the same kind of work.
This led me nicely into the third article I chose to deal with today-- Nonaka's piece on organizational knowledge creation. This is the densest paper of the three for this post, but its argument boils down to the idea that proper use of organizations can help new knowledge grow and improve as it spreads. In this way, as above, knowledge creation is interactive and dependent on a larger community to thrive.
A few links of note: this Huffington Post article on tips for organizational work; my classmate Kelly's thoroughly entertaining post about social media and disaster; Rebecca's post which uses the same article to no less thoughtful and entertaining effect.
~*~
Readings Discussed:
Chua, A. Y. K., & Banerjee, S. (2013). Customer knowledge management via social media: The case of Starbucks. Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 17(2), 237-249. doi:10.1108/13673271311315196
Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. The Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266. URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/259373
Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1), 14-37. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2635068
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