Search Results

Supporting knowledge management with information technology is widely characterized as a technical challenge — one of devising an information system in which only those people entitled to use a given piece of knowledge can gain access to it, and then making it as easy as possible for those people to do so. This chapter argues that the changing nature of the employment relationship poses a real challenge in getting employees to freely contribute their knowledge in the first place. When organizational competence is based on well articulated knowledge that is well diffused within a company, it may become difficult for the firm to appropriate such knowledge. In both cases, extracting full economic profits from knowledge potentially on offer becomes problematic for a firm. This dilemma is called the paradox of value. This chapter presents a fundamental conceptual framework known as the Information Space or I-Space for the examination of information flows among agents within a firm, and discusses how recent developments in information technology are likely to exacerbate the paradox of value.

The ATLAS experiment at CERN, having entered the operational phase in September 2008, is designed to run for fifteen to twenty years. In terms of its aims, its sheer size, its complexity, and the number of scientists involved, it is one of the most challenging scientific enterprises ever undertaken. What is the nature of this enterprise? The ATLAS detector itself can be thought of as a giant measuring instrument that interposes itself between the experimenter and the phenomenal world. Much of an experimenter's time is devoted to tending the instrument in collaboration with others. This tending process has been described as care of the self. Such care, when undertaken collectively, is dependent upon the effective flow of information and knowledge between the different groups inside the collaboration that are responsible for the ‘caring’. Since information and knowledge flows constitute the lifeblood of all organizational processes — the focus in this book — this chapter presents a conceptual framework, the Information-Space or I-Space, that helps with the exploration the nature of these knowledge and information flows in the chapters that follow.

Drawing on four short case studies of how the ATLAS collaboration selects and works with its suppliers, this chapter highlights some of the issues involved. First it briefly outlines and discusses ATLAS's supplier selection process. It then presents a conceptual framework that helps categorize ATLAS suppliers. Finally, it presents the four cases and interprets them using both the framework and the I-Space. The chapter concludes by asking to what extent ATLAS's experience with its suppliers can be of use to other organizations.

This chapter shifts the focus to individuals working in the ATLAS Collaboration. What do they expect to get out of working in a large team such as the ATLAS Collaboration and what will others get out of their participation? Answers to these questions lie at the interface of individual and collective learning — sometimes called ‘organization learning’. Drawing on interviews with individuals working in the ATLAS Collaboration, the chapter explores how the learning experiences offered to the individual in the ATLAS project scale up to trigger collective learning, and, in turn, how the latter, working in tandem with CERN's institutional structures, subsequently comes to shape the context of individual learning processes. The interviewees were drawn from the many different groups working on the detector — the tile calorimeter, the liquid argon detector, the pixel detector, the trigger, the software group, and so on. Some were working on their doctoral thesis in experimental physics, others were postdocs. Some were physicists, some were electronic or mechanical engineers, some were software specialists. In order better to understand the learning dynamics that characterize Big Science, the concept of social capital was used to link up the individual learning experiences of individuals to the collective outcomes that drive the social learning cycle (SLC) in the I-Space.

This chapter offers some reflections on Max Boisot and his extraordinary intellect drawn from our 15 years of exchanging and crafting ideas together. I first comment on the process of working with Max, and then suggest some of the remarkable qualities of thought that I believe distinguished Max's keen intellect as I came to experience it through our collaborations. I note in particular the breadth of perspectives that Max inevitably brought to any discussion, his ability to draw multiple theoretical perspectives together in composing novel representations of economic and organizational phenomena, and his ability to rigorously categorize and usefully interrelate the many theories and concepts with which he was conversant. These qualities are illustrated through some further comments on the process of writing our 2010 paper on economic organizing. I conclude by suggesting how these qualities of thought are also reflected in Max's individual work and especially in his crowning achievement, the Information-Space Model.

In ‘The Creation and Sharing of Knowledge‘, Max Boisot illustrates his approach to the effective management of knowledge resources. He starts by giving a brief historical background description of knowledge management, highlighting its importance for contemporary economic activity, and explaining unresolved challenges. He then describes the properties of knowledge and explains learning and the generation of new knowledge through the Information Space (I-Space) and the Social Learning Cycle (SLC). Boisot examines the difficulties encountered in valuing information and knowledge goods and shows how they differ from physical resources. He ends by discussing managerial implications, pointing to new governance arrangements and strategies for knowledge-based firms.