Cross Cultural Perspectives on Knowledge Management.

Article Name: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Knowledge Management.
Author: Robert Mason
Publication: D Pauleen (ed.). Libraries Limited.
Keywords: Cross Cultural knowledge management perspective, knowledge management systems, organizational behaviour.

Review: (725 Words)

Author outline the recursive relationship between learning and knowledge, reviews recent research on the cultural foundations of learning and knowledge, and proposes a model of boundary spanning which can help global organizations meet the challenge of unlocking the knowledge represented by the different cultural and ethnic backgrounds of their members. Author also addresses the issue of culture and ethnic background as dimensions of knowledge management and the learning organization.

Consequently, organizations have considerable motivation to manage their knowledge asset effectively and to use this asset as the basis for further learning. Toward this goal, many organizations have established systems of knowledge management. The interest in knowledge management, as indicated by the number of research articles on the subject, does not seem to follow the kind of increase, peak, and decrease pattern that has been observed in other management fads (Ponzi and Koenig 2002).

Knowledge management systems as currently envisioned and designed have a significant cultural gap that can lead to underutilizing some of the organization’s knowledge assets—those assets represented and embedded in the persons who are not from mainstream Western cultures. The systems as currently designed may unwittingly place barriers to knowledge access by those from non-Western cultures, and the knowledge of organizational members who are not from Western cultures may not be captured or communicated by the KMS. Bridging this cultural gap in KMS design requires an understanding of the recursive relationship between learning and knowledge.

Learning can either enlarge the range of options (the entity sees new possibilities) or narrow the range of options (the entity can eliminate some actions from further consideration). Some researchers have argued that when an individual in an organization learns, the organization itself has learned. The communication of individual learning to others in the organization is also necessary for the organization to mobilize around its goals and strategy for pursuing these goals. The traditional view of knowledge is that it fits into a hierarchical model: knowledge is at the top of a pyramid whose middle layer is information and whose lowest level is comprised of data.

Knowledge can be viewed as a store of accumulated and interpreted information, but it also can be viewed as a social process by which individuals and organizations continually apprehend and make sense of information based on prior knowledge.

Today, the concepts of tacit and explicit have been explored in much of the writing about knowledge management and knowledge creation. Discussing and communicating about the explicit dimension is straightforward and there is little controversy about it. The explicit dimension of knowledge is expressed in words and can be communicated to others using language, diagrams, or other tangible artifacts. The tacit dimension may represent physical skills, such as riding a bicycle, but it also reflects concepts of values and facts that are commonly known (sometimes referred to as ‘common sense’) to a society or group. These commonly known values and facts are socially constructed and transmitted, as through apprenticeships (learning from a few masters) and through the broader cultural environment.

Author defined culture as “the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning. This chapter opened with the quote from Hall (1990, 47) on the relationship between learning and culture: “once people have learned to learn in a given way it is extremely difficult to learn in any other way . . . culture reflects the way one learns.”. Vygotsky and others (1987) proposed that learning can best be understood by taking an explicit culture-centered approach. The relationship between and among culture, learning, and personal knowledge suggests that knowledge management techniques that are appropriate in one culture may not be effective for organizations that comprise members from multiple cultures or organizations that seek to serve multiple cultures.

Access to all the knowledge available within an organization is constrained when a KMS does not explicitly plan for the inclusion of multiple cultures in the creation, storage, and transfer of knowledge. A KMS designed by and for a particular organizational culture by its nature restricts the range of schema by which knowledge is classified and stored, and thus the creation of new knowledge is limited to discussions within the meta framework provided by the collective combination of these schema.

Review: (115 Words)

This article is one of exclusive writings from other articles. It portrays a sense of formal knowledge management framework highlighting the cross-cultural perspectives on Knowledge Management. One of the beauties about this article is that it explored positive, neutral and negative views of the cultural based knowledge management trends and provided with clear evidences and investigations of several authors.
One of the few weaknesses of the articles is that it’s not targeting one particular audience and keeping the views quite general and open. Conclusion is well built but leaves me with few questions to explore and search, which is on the other hand, is productive for audience. Overall it’s a nice article and worth reading.