In this chapter I bring together my central themes and point to the future. A compelling feature of research on KN is that it stands at the intersection of so many important theoretical and policy issues such as the converging trends surrounding globalization and the “flattening” of our world; the increasing complexity and blurring boundaries represented in new organizational forms; difficult individual challenges selecting career paths and loyalty, or the lack thereof, on everyone's part, cited in Chapter 1. These trends lead to dilemmas, for both individuals and organizations, in the development and sharing of knowledge in KN.

I discussed the fundamental concepts, the building blocks of KN, in Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2 I defined knowledge, distinguishing it from such common terms as information and wisdom. This chapter also discussed the various forms that knowledge can take within organizations, thus making critical distinctions that can be used in defining relationships.

I will use productivity in its broadest sense here, focusing on the generation of wealth in organizations in a variety of forms entailing social as well as economic capital, which also suggests some degree of efficiency and of effectiveness. Since these terms are closely interrelated I will begin with some basic definitional issues. As the colon in the chapter title implies, productivity is a function of both effectiveness and efficiency, with the former term somewhat more difficult to define concretely.

Effectiveness details a desired outcome or result. It therefore implies some degree of rationality, intention, and purpose and could be closely associated in this sense with more functional approaches to organizations. It implies some martialing or matching of organizational outputs to particular goals that here I will discuss primarily in terms of contingency impacts and resource-based views of strategy.

In this and the following chapter on network analysis I will concentrate on building a foundation for what is to follow. I start this work by defining the key concepts associated with knowledge, drawing careful distinctions between them. Needless to say these terms are at times used interchangeably and at times are taken to be quite different things in the burgeoning literature in this area. I then move on to a discussion of various classifications of types of knowledge, starting with the foundational one between tacit and explicit knowledge. These types could serve as the starting point for the definition of relationships in network analysis, the most critical move in any project relating to it. Finally, in part to serve as counterpoint but also to focus on critical dilemmas and questions of balance in organizations, to which managerial judgment must be applied, I discuss ignorance and the positive role it plays in organizations.

What is knowledge?

Knowledge runs the gamut from data, to information, to wisdom, with a variety of distinctions being made between these terms in the literature. While there is a generally recognized ordering among these terms (see Figure 2.1), with wisdom having the least coverage of any of the sets in the figure, they are often used interchangeably and in conflicting ways in the literature, resulting in some confusion (Boahene and Ditsa 2003).

There are many elements of the larger organizational context, such as pay and promotion systems, which can impinge on human relationships in KN. However, the focus of this chapter will be on how the human composition of the organization affects the development of KN. Generally researchers have focused on the macro nature of the human environment either in terms of climate or cultural impacts, regarding these phenomena as the macro-media that flavor any interactions embedded within them and the resulting development of particular KN. For example, closed climates are likely to be associated with particularly constrained, fragmented networks that inhibit the free flow of information. Here I first discuss one aspect of macro-media, organizational demography, or the nature of the human composition of the workplace. How individuals come to understand their roles in organizations is a unique form of tacit knowledge which I discuss by focusing on role ambiguity. I then turn to the more classic micro issues related to motivations and individual ignorance, before returning to issues of status and face that blend these two perspectives.

Organizational demography

Organizational demography refers to the composition of the human membership of the organization in terms of such basic attributes as sex and age (Pfeffer 1982). It has been argued that the distribution of such attributes in an organization's population has important consequences for institutions and their members, especially so in the transfer of knowledge (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001).

Spatial dimensions of time–space relations are fundamental to most scientific inquiry. However, for a long time the social sciences have been spatially “blind,” unattuned to the effects of distance and positioning on human interaction, but advances in geographic information systems have demonstrated the rich possibilities for visualization by approaching problems spatially. “…spatial structure is now seen not merely as an arena in which social life unfolds, but rather as a medium through which social relations are produced and reproduced” (Gregory and Urry 1985, p. 3). In fact, spatial factors also represent a larger movement in communication and management theory, since some view space as equivalent to context in providing the medium within which social interaction is embedded (Hatch 1987; Pfeffer 1982).

An irreducible fact of human existence is that individuals are located within a physical world. While individual locations in space may be attributable to a number of factors, they provide the basic context within which all communication occurs. Indeed, it has been argued more generally that fixed physical distances between nodes are one source of stability in network structures (Barnett and Rice 1985). As Pfeffer (1982) has pointed out, examination of communication structure and spatial factors serves as a very attractive alternative to traditional approaches to organizational theory.

The career and life winners of the future will be those people who know where to go to find information, can then process large volumes of it, and, ultimately, make sense of it by converting it into useful knowledge. As we have seen, finding knowledge in organizations is a complex phenomenon and there are many barriers that seekers must overcome. The previous chapters have been devoted to understanding KN. In this chapter I turn first to individual strategies that help people identify where knowledge might reside in a KN, what feedback seeking they use to determine others reaction to them, and how they might best forage for information. Management's role in KN becomes largely one of setting an agenda that specifies what critical questions need to be explored, and then facilitating and enhancing knowledge acquisition related to these issues by creating rich information fields.

Individual strategies

In general, the focus of the literature has been on how information can be provided to organizational members, rather than what motivates them to seek answers to questions they pose for themselves; the latter process has also been labeled knowledge sourcing (Gray and Meister 2004).

A fundamental necessity of social action is that it must occur within a context. While context is central to all explanations of social science, it has been examined most often in micro, discourse-related processes or situational semantics. Knowledge is inherently embedded in particular social situations (Birkinshaw, Nobel, and Ridderstrale 2002). The relationship between context and information seeking is a problem increasingly viewed as the central issue in information behavior research (Cool 2001; Dervin 1997, 2003; Johnson 2003; Pettigrew, Fidel, and Bruce 2001; Talja, Keso, and Pietilainen 1999; Taylor 1986).

Generally, the persistent theoretical problem of accounting for individual action in a social context is seldom explicitly addressed and we are unaware of the different senses of “context” in use (Dervin 1997). Especially lacking is the identification of “active” ingredients of the environment that trigger changes in KN (Johnson 2003).

In Chapter 4 we looked at the information fields in which organizations are embedded and discussed some broad conceptualizations of how organizations interact with their information environments. While this book has focused on knowledge within organizations, how knowledge is brought in from the world outside in collaborative relationships is becoming an issue of paramount importance (Gulati 2007). First, the world outside the organization is often the primary source of highly technical, specialized knowledge. Second, environments create imperatives for organizations to learn, to adapt to a changing world. Managers may even trust external information more, given that it is scarce, that it is less subject to scrutiny, and that there are not status or competitive implications for accepting it (Menon and Pfeffer 2003). Third, knowledge sharing is increasingly viewed as a vital mission for organizations that focus on service delivery (Wright and Taylor 2003). Finally, the development of tacit-knowledge communities in many cases is only scalable if individuals outside of the organization (e.g., other members of a profession, suppliers, or customers) can be included in KN.

Here I will first review the role of individual agents, boundary spanners, in bringing in information. Later I turn to more contemporary conceptions that emphasize the role of brokers, who sometimes serve as boundary spanners, but who also have broader roles, especially in the operation of consortia. Increasingly, knowledge and learning are the outcome of complex interrelationships between parties involved in consortia (Powell 1998).