Organizations and Markets

| Nicolai Foss |

Along with Euro colleagues such as Prof. Anna Grandori (Bocconi University) and my colleagues at the Center for Strategic Management and Globalization here at the Copenhagen Business School I have championed the notion of “knowledge governance” as a distinct perspective on knowledge management that explicitly relies on “rational” organization theory (including organizational economics), is methodologically individualist, etc. 

The lead article of the most recent issue of Organization: the Critical Journal of Organization, Theory, and Society (yes, I am publishing in a pomo journal) — a special issue on “the philosophical foundations of knowledge management” edited by Andreas Georg Scherer and JC Spender – is my knowledge governance primer, “The Emerging Knowledge Governance Approach: Challenges and Characteristics” (I’d be happy to send you a copy if you cannot access the file).  Here is the abstract:

The “knowledge governance approach” is characterized as a distinctive, emerging approach that cuts across the fields of knowledge management, organisation studies, strategy, and human resource management. Knowledge governance is taken up with how the deployment of governance mechanisms influences knowledge processes, such as sharing, retaining and creating knowledge. It insists on clear micro (behavioural) foundations, adopts an economizing perspective, and examines the links between knowledge-based units of analysis with diverse characteristics and governance mechanisms with diverse capabilities of handling these transactions. Research issues that the knowledge governance approach illuminates are sketched.