Knowledge Management Paper for Wosc Text

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the frame of knowledge the literature of knowledge management goes back over three thousand years. Written around 1,0 bc, this book was a training manual for egyptian civil servants and a guide to wise professional practice. We can still read traces of amenemopets advice to young managers in the book of proverbs aitken 1968: 3 johnson 1998: x new jerusalem bible: 964 5.

The hebrew word for wisdom chokmah means skillfulness in dealing with the job that is before us, writes johnson 1998: vi , comparing it with the greek word techne, the rational application of principles aimed at making or doing something well. Many scholars contrast the wisdom embodied in techne to the wisdom embodied in sophia. Browning 1997: 306 describes the writers of the wisdom literature as intellectuals but not in the greek tradition of speculative philosophers hebrew wisdom was exemplified in practical skills, knowledge about how to manage ones life and about the purpose of life.

He asserts that the wisdom literature is perfect for anyone who believes like the greeks that the unexamined life is not worth living. This person, he states, is by nature a lover of wisdom: a philosopher johnson 1998: vi. _ _ this leads us to an issue that forms the core of knowledge management, the link between speculation and experience, theory and practice, thought and behavior.

Nonaka and takeuchi 1995 emphasize the cycle of transformation from explicit knowledge to implicit knowledge and back again. This cycle is the basis of an integrated concept of knowledge richer and more effective than a concept of knowledge based solely on theory and rational planning. Behavior, practice, and experience feed knowledge along with rational cognition and theory building. Different ways of thinking and different kinds of thought shape organizational knowledge. This interplay requires a cycle that anchors new learning in the behavioral web of situated knowledge.

Practice and reflection, action and theorizing on the results of action unite in effective theory in use. The concept of knowledge management has therefore developed a broader and more philosophical frame than most management literature in recent decades. If the worthy life requires examination, it is impossible to keep the wisdom of theory thinking and the wisdom of practice doing apart. Since the greeks, however, some western thinkers have proposed a division between thinking and doing, knowledge and action. Plato contrasts the world of idea and archetype to the mortal, physical world in which we live. For plato, the world of human existence is an inferior shadow of that other, superior reality.

Despite his brilliance, plato himself failed to think through the implied lessons of his teacher, socrates. In platos phaedo, socrates says that, the superlative thing to know the explanation of everything, why it comes to be, why it perishes, why it is. Although limited by human imperfection and available technology, aristotle was concerned with apprehending the mortal, physical world in an attempt to explain.

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Aristotle, as much an empirical biologist as a speculative philosopher morowitz 1993: 160 163 , has been ill served by the work of scholastic philosophers who concentrated on his other work to the neglect of his research and writing on the life sciences. Ignorance of the central role that biology and philosophy of science held in aristotles academy continues to this day. Of the three great conceptual approaches to science observation, experimentation, and theory experimentation was unknown to the classical greek savants. They worked back and forth between observation and theory and therefore lacked the powerful weapon of falsification to prune wrong theories morowitz 1993: 161 2.

It was not until the great age of physics that galileo, newton and bacon developed the concept of robust experiment that made scientific progress by stabilizing scientific method with its third leg. The debates on theory and practice, idealism and realism, thinking and action are no exception. individual learning and organizational learning although the process of learning and the nature of knowledge are not completely understood, there is wide agreement that knowledge creation requires experience. Kolbs 1984: 38 definition of learning as the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience offers a useful perspective. Kolb emphasizes the relationship between experience and knowledge as a dynamic process of continuous reproduction and regeneration.

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It contradicts the static model of learning as acquiring knowledge external to and independent of the learner. Knowledge inheres in human beings and the specific form of knowledge is often contingent on the learning process. Because knowledge is human, developing knowledge requires thinking and practice, mind and body both. Learning requires human agency, a concept synonymous with heideggers concept of care, the human tendency for each person to care about his own existence heidegger 1993: 238. For heidegger, both practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge express of human care in an intimate relationship between action and knowledge.

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