Posted by Yogesh Malhotra on July 22, 1997 at 00:30:22:

In Reply to: Re: The issue of sharing knowledge posted by Mark Meckler on July 20, 1997 at 16:00:40:

I find your work on generalizable, yet specific contexts of interest and relevance to the debate surrounding knowledge management. However, based on what I read in your message, the work calls for reconciling the universality/generalizability of co ntexts across multiple domains with the very bases of the contexts. Specifically, one may need to ask: What is the origin of 'context' within any given scope? One may opine that given the notions of 'meaning' and [potential] 'action,' contexts are [at lea st to an extent] specific to the person and the circumstances [reminds us of Wheatly's cite on 'solutions']. Given this scenario, how does one go about reconciling the [theoretical] generalizability with the [practical] need for specificity to a given industry/company/situation, etc.? [More on the arguable definitions of these concepts is discussed later.]

The question posed by you: "Is there a critical mass at which certainty and consistency become stable across applications?" This question seems t o be particularly challenging. For theoretical abstraction, one does need to provide for generalizability [within a given scope], while allowing for the falsifiability of the underlying hypotheses. On the other hand, for practical application, one needs t he answers here and now, say, for the beverage industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the beverage company, or the petrochemical firm.

A key question that has been at the back of my mind, but which has perhaps escaped attention in the past discussion, is about the extant notion of concepts such as industry, company, organization, etc. [This question seems relevant to a number of participants queries about industr or firm specific information.] Do we have standard definitions of such terms anymore? What is the current status of these concepts? [Reminds us of our earlier debate on definitions and non- definitions.]

• 
  Given the mainstream appeal of virtual organizations and outsourcing, and the changing interpretations of the firm-employee relationship (cf: the discussion on the new psychological contract; increasing number of temp or 'virtual positions', etc.), how does one relate to the traditional definition of the organization as a 'unit of employees having a common organizational goal' [It is even questionable if the organizations should indeed have a common organizational goal. Such pre-specified 'common goals' may cause the misalignment of the theory of business with the dynamic reality (cf: Drucker, P.F. "The Theory of Business") or emphasize "more of the same" that may cause locked-in organizational / individual responses, thus resulting in the organizational "death spiral" (Nadler & Shaw).]. This issue is particularly of interest given the recent arguments in favor of encouraging conflict within organizations for making the whole organizational brain work. See, for instance, the articles in the Jul-Aug '97 issues of Harvard Business Review entitled: How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight and Putting Your Company's Whole Brain to Work. We are reminded of our earlier discussion on'How to Facilitate Knowledge 'Sharing'?' in which we discussed Shell's process of strategic planning in which multiple perspectives are surfaced and shared to facilitate some level of shared understanding.
  
• 
  Given the shift from the traditional notion of 'industry' to newer concepts, such as 'business ecosystems' (discussed in the section on Virtual Corporations & Outsourcing), how does one frame one's understanding of organizations within a broader context. Or, how about the irrelevance of the 'industries' concept as argued by Mathur and Kenyon in their article 'Our Strategy is What We Sell,' in the Long Range Planning special issue( June 1997; vol. 30) on Intellectual Capital [and Knowledge Management].They assert that traditionally literature has equated 'industry' with a 'public market.' Given their arguments that very few offerings have public markets, they have suggest the irrelevance of the 'industries' concept. Giving an example, they state: "If we thought about our offering as being (say) in a widely defined fastening industry, we might ignore some important facts such as: even if the demand for string and drawing-pins is declining, adhesive tape may be a growth market." Their view also seems consistent with 'market myopia' discussed by Leavitt* (1960) in his Harvard Business Review 'classic.' He had discussed cases of companies caught in 'market myopia' and inventing 'buggy whips' for markets that didn't exist anymore.
  
• The above issues also hold for the companies within any given industry.
.

Your focus on specificity of contexts also seems to go against some of the key bases of knowledge creation that Nonaka and Takeuchi have discussed in their book The Knowledge Creating Company. Specifically, in their model, the "strategic equivocality" of the top management's vision encourages an active investigation of the alternatives to established procedures. At the level of the implementing staff, ambiguity of the knowledge vision translates into "interpretive equivocality" which facilitates reflection-in-action resulting in creative chaos. The traditional model of organizations assumes a problem as given and the solution is based upon a "preset algorithm" typified by management's 'perfect' knowledge of outcomes or processes involved in knowledge creation. In contrast, their model suggests that the construction of the problem definition occurs from the knowledge available at a certain point in time and context.

Given such models, contexts need to be flexible, dynamic, and thus provide the ability for reacting [or even preempting the situations in situ], to maximize the adaptive capacity of the department or the organization. [Also see related work by Starbuck, Hedberg, Janson, etc.]

The key issue is not about questioning the feasibility or desirability of generalizable, yet specific contexts, however the challenges to be surmounted, and the related issues that need to be addressed in any such pursuit, need careful consideration.

(A quick note on the predictive models based on nonlinear-dynamics, and the work on the chaordic systems: One needs to observe that such models provide predictability only over the short term, and do not assure long term predictability. [More on such models is discussed in the section titled Complexity, Complex Systems & Chaos Theory.])

(*) Leavitt, Ted (1960, July- August). Marketing Myopia, Harvard Business Review, 38, pp. 24- 47.

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