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Knowledge management methodologies

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-04-09, 09:32 authored by Hilary Kane, Gillian Ragsdell, Charles Oppenheim
Knowledge management (KM) research and practice embraces a wide range of activities and interests. The KM domain covers, on the one hand, technological interventions that aim to support knowledge dissemination and, on the other hand, to appreciation of social approaches that bring people together to share their experiences. The former represents an earlier bias in the field while the latter is more indicative of the current emphasis. Such a shift in emphasis has called for a shift in the way that the research and practice is undertaken; this paper focuses on research activities and asserts the appropriateness of a particular methodology for today/s knowledge management research. This paper will firstly consider the range of research methodologies that have been employed in knowledge management research. It will move on to consider the use of one particular research methodology, ethnography, as a framework for understanding the more personal elements of knowledge. It is contended that use of ethnography, which emphasises observation within a compact cultural setting, offers a potentially ideal method of undertaking research in knowledge management because it concentrates on a community and in the provision of descriptions of how members of the community interact with each other. Utilisation of ethnography as a research method sits comfortably with theories of knowledge, which acknowledge the tacit element of knowledge and its experiential embeddedness; ethnography is therefore put forward as a meaningful methodology for contemporary knowledge management research.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management

Volume

4

Issue

(2)

Pages

141 - 152

Citation

KANE, H., RAGSDELL, G. and OPPENHEIM, C., 2006. Knowledge management methodologies. Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, 4 (2), pp.141-152.

Publisher

© Academic Conferences Ltd

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2006

Notes

This is an Open Access article. It is published by Academic Conferences and Publishing International under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

ISSN

1479-4411

Language

  • en