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An organization possesses three kinds of knowledge: tacit or personal knowledge; explicit or codified knowledge, and cultural knowledge in its beliefs and norms. An organization can create new knowledge by (1) converting between tacit and explicit knowledge; (2) extending core capabilities; and (3) transferring knowledge across different parts of the organization. Knowledge sharing depends on social networks that are built on norms of trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. This chapter looks at a number of cases that exemplify these concepts, including the community of practice in the Xerox Eureka project, and knowledge transfer at GM-Toyota NUMMI.

Companies involved in R&D collaboration face a serious challenge: they want to achieve the intended benefits from the collaboration without risking unintended knowledge sharing. This chapter argues that socialization tactics are a highly efficient and relatively low-cost mechanism for governing individual knowledge-sharing behaviour and can substitute more resource-demanding mechanisms. Socialization tactics can be utilized to influence R&D workers' dual allegiance (i.e., their loyalty to their own organization and to the collaboration). The chapter develops a classification of four distinct types of R&D individual collaborators' dual allegiance: Lonely Wolfs, Gone Native, Company Soldiers, and Gatekeepers. These types differ on several dimensions and hence, require different governance, e.g., predispose the employment of different context, content, and social aspects of socialization.

This chapter identifies four sources of problems that promote knowledge loss in organizations by creating barriers to knowledge sharing and knowledge management. It suggests change management strategies for dealing with them. The sources identified are: the fact that no one gets promoted for investing in knowledge retention; poor interpersonal expert/novice dynamics; organizational conflict that undermines knowledge sharing; and the psychological trap of “competing commitments” that creates organizational barriers to action.

This chapter discusses how cross-border synergies can be created in banks and insurance companies by enabling the transfer of knowledge within the network of international units. It highlights the critical role of knowledge and knowledge sharing in making internationalization strategies work. It describes nine elements of an organizational culture that facilitates cross-border knowledge sharing and shows how to design a system that supports the international flow of knowledge. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the limits of cross-border knowledge sharing.

This chapter surveys the literature on knowledge integration. Three approaches to knowledge integration are identified: (a) knowledge integration as knowledge sharing or knowledge transfer; (b) knowledge integration as the use of related knowledge; and (c) knowledge integration as the combination of specialized and complementary knowledge. Empirical studies of knowledge integration are categorized into those that investigate factors influencing knowledge integration and those that study the outcomes of knowledge integration. Studies of influencing factors have in particular pointed to task characteristics, knowledge characteristics, and relational characteristics, while studies of outcomes of knowledge integration have primarily focused on outcomes pertaining to efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation. The chapter identifies needs for further research on the multilevel context of knowledge integration, the creative and dynamic aspects of knowledge integration, and the project-based setting of knowledge integration.

This chapter focuses on the importance of trust in supporting effective knowledge sharing, highlighting the importance of both competence and benevolence in developing trustworthy relationships with others. It discusses a survey of 138 employees from three companies: a division from a US pharmaceutical company, a division of a British bank, and a large group within a Canadian oil and gas company. All three groups were composed of people engaged in knowledge-intensive work. Respondents were asked to consider a recent project they had worked on, and to rate the usefulness of the knowledge they received from those whom they had sought out advice on that project. The results of the survey, which were similar across the three companies, identified some actionable recommendations for companies looking to share knowledge more effectively across their organizations.

This chapter focuses on the different types of knowledge that are shared within an alliance relationship, and how the knowledge exchanges between different partners can influence the development of a larger alliance strategy. It presents a conceptual model, the Partner Resource Exchange Model, that addresses the nature of the knowledge resource exchange based on three critical dimensions of knowledge (tacitness, specificity, and complexity), as well as the role of the partner in an industry context (complementor, competitor, supplier, customer, and other). Alliance announcements from two major computer hardware firms: Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Dell Computer Corporation, from 1990 to 1998, were analyzed to illustrate the application of the model.

This chapter examines how social network analysis can be used as a diagnostic technique for better understanding myriad organizational challenges, ranging from improving communication between functional organizations to identifying key knowledge-sharing roles and responsibilities. A research program is described that aims to determine how organizations can better support work occurring in informal networks of employees. Working with a consortium of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, collaboration and work in over forty informal networks from twenty-three different organizations was assessed. In all cases, the networks studied provided strategic and operational value to the embedding organization by enabling employees to effectively collaborate and integrate disparate expertise.

Supernatural agent representations are mental concepts, whereas texts, uttered words, and so forth are extramental, public representations. They express mental representations. Public representations also trigger mental representations. Knowledge is called “shared” when ideas in individual minds can be seen as differing versions of each other. Traditions, cultures, and religions are abstractions based on the observed overlap in mental and public representations. They are not entities with an essence. “Religions” are abstractions based on the observed overlap in both mental and public representations, not classes with an essence.

This chapter dispels six commonly held assumptions about networks in organizations. These myths include: (i) to build better networks, we have to communicate more; (ii) everyone should be connected to everyone else; (iii) we can't do much to aid informal networks; (iv) how people fit into networks is a matter of personality (which can't be changed); (v) central people who have become bottlenecks should make themselves more accessible; and (vi) I already know what is going on in my network.

The Greek expression for conscience meant in the 5^th century BCE: sharing with oneself, as if one were split into two, knowledge of a personal defect, not yet always a moral one. The Christian Saint Paul was to link knowledge of the personal with knowledge of a general law of both right and wrong. Gandhi paraphrased in Gujarati Plato's Apology, in which Socrates is portrayed as having an inner warning voice. Platonists were to identify it with conscience, and, like Gandhi, to discuss how it worked. Gandhi treated his own inner voice, like Socrates but unlike Saint Paul, as indubitable, but conceded that it takes practice to hear it aright. He regarded the voice as God's, but as reminding one of values, not as supplying them, and as binding, even when mistaken. Conscience, he thought, speaks only to the individual, but may tell one to change the conduct of others.

This chapter examines the process of knowledge sharing and use of information technologies in health care, drawing upon evidence from the use of the Internet for health purposes in the European Union. The Internet appears as a relatively new information source with the potential to bring efficiency gains and health production benefits. However, little is known about the specific determinants of the search for information, especially under heterogeneous cultural and institutional settings, such as those of European Union member states.

This chapter examines the evidence across the cases on inter-organizational learning, purportedly one of the benefits of the network form. The chapter discusses the diversity of attitudes to learning displayed in the case and the formal and informal mechanisms adopted to facilitate knowledge sharing and exchange. Overall, conclusion is that there were relatively low levels of inter-organizational learning in the cases. It is noted that some important aspects of inter-organizational learning were under-developed in most networks and reasons for this and the consequences are explored. Recommendations are offered on the features which would facilitate inter-organizational learning. A conceptualization is also commenced of the criteria for assessing knowledge exchange and learning.

Common ground refers to the sum of all the information that people assume they share that may include world views, shared values, beliefs, and situational context. According to current research if people have common or similar prior experience, participate in similar actions and events, they know each other and have been in similar situations before, all that will result in common ground. Similar prior contexts, prior experience and similar understanding of the actual situational context will build common ground. The main problem of intercultural communication is that interactants have very little common ground. They need to co-construct it in the communicative process. The chapter distinguishes core common ground and emergent common ground with the latter being decisive in intercultural interactions. There is a ‘not sure’ approach introduced, which means that the speakers have some kind of predisposition toward their communicative partners, they are not exactly sure what they can expect from their counterparts.

Max Boisot’s Information-Space (I-Space) framework greatly facilitates understanding of the dynamics of a knowledge-based economy, with implications for competitive or collaborative organizational strategies. This chapter addresses what is strategic about knowledge management, and how to develop knowledge-based strategies. Boisot’s research goal was to develop, test, and exploit the I-Space as a conceptual and applications framework and to build strategic knowledge management tools. With these tools decision makers can start manage their knowledge assets strategically to better compete in the information age. Two major types of intervention tools are reviewed: the first for mapping portfolios of critical knowledge as opposed to physical assets, mapping cultural and organizational structures, and mapping associated learning paths; and the second for simulating strategic knowledge management processes, in particular knowledge flows derived from knowledge-based agent interactions.

This chapter proposes that the mechanism of natural pedagogy is ostensive communication, which incorporates evolved interpretive biases that allow and foster the transmission of generic and culturally shared knowledge to others. Such communication is not necessarily linguistic but always referential. There is extensive evidence that infants and children are especially sensitive to being communicatively addressed by adults, and that even newborns attend to and show preference for ostensive signals, such as eye contact, infant-directed speech, or infant-induced contingent reactivity. Such ostensive cues generate referential expectations in infants, triggering a tendency to gaze-follow the other's subsequent orientation responses (such as gaze-shifts) to their referential target, which may contribute to learning about referential signals such as deictic gestures and words. The chapter also addresses some of the most frequently asked questions about natural pedagogy in order to resolve some typical misunderstandings about what is and what is not claimed by the theory.

‘Postscript: Content Preservation’ (2011) serves as postscript not only to ‘Content Preservation’ but to the other essays on interlocution. It centers on three issues. One is the role of knowledge in an antecedent chain of communication in making knowledge by a recipient possible. A second is the Acceptance Principle‐the principle that we have a defeasible, apriori, default warrant to accept what another person says, other things equal. A third is the epistemic status of the initial comprehension of another’s utterance. On the second issue, the postscript defends the Acceptance Principle against some recent criticisms. On the first and third issues, Burge criticizes his earlier views in some detail. Regarding the third issue, Burge no longer believes that human beings’ epistemic entitlement to rely on their comprehension of what another says as a correct comprehension can ever be non‐empirical, though the default warrant is, in a sense, just a barely empirical entitlement.

In this dialogue, Hal Abelson the acclaimed professor, scientist and distinguished member of MIT CSAIL, and co-chair of the MIT Council on Educational Technology (MITCET), firstly discusses the potential of the digital revolution and Internet. He talks about the reasons that led him to initiate Creative Commons (Abelson was also involved with the start up of MIT OpenCourseWare, Public Knowledge, the Free Software Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology). He then describes in detail the MIT model. On the one hand it is based on not making distinctions between teaching and research, and on the other it focuses on radical meritocracy, which gives rise to a culture of open exchange and openness. He moves on to explain details of the philosophy behind the prestigious MIT Course 6, which uses semiconductors to bring together the physical side of electrical engineering and the logic side of IT, thereby generating a range of innovative interactions. He finally talks about the foundations of leadership which MIT have laid and continue to maintain in education and innovation.