The material, mental, historical and social character of knowledge

Article Summary for Week 5 Class 7

(Group: KMx6- Fatemeh, Skalk, Bee, Lanoi, Max, Roger)

Rooney, D., & Schneider, U. (2005). The material, mental, historical and social character of knowledge. In Handbook on the Knowledge Economy, New horizons in public policy (pp. 19-36). Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Type of article: Introductory chapter in a book .

Audience: Academics, Knowledge Management Professionals, Public policy makers.

Aim: This chapter provides a framework within which the rest of the chapters sit.

Summary:
The author maintains that knowledge or the act of knowing entails a number of things.
Tacit knowledge enabled modern society to come into being. Where humans used myths, stories and shared social backgrounds more socially orientated, strategic, abstract and innovative thinking occurred / are occurring. To enable these advances humans have always used symbolic, non-verbal thought systems such as imagination, intuition, analogy, and metaphor. These thought systems are used as linking mechanism to link an observation in the physical world to a description. This enabled humans to make sense of the world around them. Mention is made that knowledge have got two states, it can be articulated and un-articulated. The point is made that for knowledge to be shared in group it has to be communicable. The communicability of knowledge is dependant on the social context. A further distinction is made between procedural and declarative knowledge and intuition. An argument is then made that knowledge sits within a social-related and an interpretative-relational contexts. Individuals, as knowers’, are also doers. Individuals need to be made aware and be helped to cooperate, contest, advocate and communicate in the interest of better knowing. The knowers’ situation is also defined by time and space. Models should take cognisance of how information is diffused in groups through mediating technologies. Enactment of knowledge is the key aspect of knowledge transfer. Knowers enact knowledge strategically, the intentions are purposeful to realise goals and objectives for now or in the future. Knowledge systems are not predictable or controllable. This is a problem for managers and public policy makers. Strategic interventions can be put in place to enact knowledge. Wisdom and attention to context would be key elements for good public policy. The author them lists nine key observations from the article.


Review:
This chapter is part of a group of chapters on the concepts of Knowledge Management. It is not an easy ready and is highly philosophical in nature. If the reader is not comfortable with this approach or have enough prior knowledge then it is easy to loose interest. Ok use is made of headings to guide the reader through the text. Care should be taken to follow the argument. The useful bit of the article is the summary at the end (p. 33) that provides in points the position of the authors on Knowledge management and policy. These bullet points in my opinion are really useful to keep in mind if one were to explore knowledge management within Government policy.

Knowledge, economy, technology and society: The politics of discourse

Article Summary for Week 5 Class 7

(Group: KMx6- Fatemeh, Skalk, Bee, Lanoi, Max, Roger)

Rooney, D. (2005). Knowledge, economy, technology and society: The politics of discourse. Telematics and Informatics, 22(4), 405-422. doi: 10.1016/j.tele.2004.11.007

Type of article: Results of a discourse analysis.

Audience: Academics, Knowledge Management Professionals, Public policy makers.

Aim: To provide data and insight on how governments sees knowledge. With the aim to show that what might be possible in knowledge societies can not be seen or realised from a technocratic view point.

Summary:
Large corpus of documents on knowledge policy. Want to show that the discourse is technocratic. Makes the point that technocrats adopts “discourses of expert knowledge” and uses these in policy statements. Asserts that technocrats have a primary concern that knowledge is an object and must be co-modified; knowledge should have a commercial and / or industrial use. Gives a brief explanation of knowledge. Computer assisted text analysis software (Leximancer) that does automated grounded analysis were being used. Documents were obtained on a number of countries and supranational organisations (OECD, EU). The results at a high level indicated that out of the 20 most important concepts, governance, technological and commercial concepts are central. There is a sharp focus on technology and business. Social concepts like access, public and medical also appear, but are of less important. Governments appear to like to work harder on technologizing the community. The technological deterministic view that technology transforms the community, creates opportunities for access and makes people creative are most often mooted. Knowledge are used a vehicle to convey vested interests. Very few document mentions social and cultural aspects. It is concluded that the value and nature of knowledge as represented in the documents are seen only in the light of technology and economy. This is useful in that it (a) points to a society that choices a political context that is technocratic as opposed to emancipatory. Technocratic discourse threatens democracy and national sovereignty. (b) being aware of the dominant discourse would make policy writers aware of aspects that are not being mentioned. And it would make these kind of statements less like smokescreens. Reflexivity, creativity and culture are essential aspects of knowing. (c) Enacting knowledge is messy. This messiness should be valued since it enriches life.

Review:
This article reports on an innovative use of text analysis. The author goes to great length to explain the validity of the tests being performed. Although statistical counts are given for the various analysis areas it is sparingly used in the document. A shortcoming of this article is that there is no list given as to what, how many documents were analysed. No indication is given or assertion being made that the number of documents are actually representative of the discourse being studied. For the maps that are represented there is also no indication as to what the different access are where the items are being plotted. Although the results are very interesting and support the main argument of the author, the presentation could do with a little bit more work. It would be interesting to do a comparative analysis on the dataset to see where, New Zealand and Australia sits in the discourse on the Knowledge society.