IC Literature

and ex post. Finally, the proposals are resumed and reflections over limitations and future research finish the thesis.

Chapter 2

Concept-centered Literature Review and Valuing Paradigms

measurements of complex digits from recurrent events are found to be representatives for this stream of ostensive research in IC. Especially tacit knowledge has constituted problems being defined as knowledge individually, but unwittingly owned (Nonaka, 1994; Polanyi, 1997; Saint-Onge, 1996). Consensus in research supports its importance in operations (K. Kreiner, 2002) , but struggles to materialize it (Duguid, 2005).

However, research theorizing causal relations between knowledge, operations and their effects limited it-self in IC literature’s wave 1-3, A1.1⁸. Research was often focused on the notions argued to represent an awareness of the existence of non-financial elements or interpreted results estimated to verify the IC view as being helpful to for instance annual reports. The perspective of IC disclosures as value adding for the financial markets has not been supported by the financial markets (merged).

So, when Peter Drucker in 1993 from an operative view suggested that the means of production was no longer capital, natural resources or labor, but knowledge, then the IC domain had been exploring knowledge as assets for some time. Changes were described as 'The central wealth-creating activities will be neither the allocation of capital to productive use nor "labor" –the two poles of nineteenth and twentieth-century economic theory . . . Value is created by

"productivity" and "innovation", both applications of knowledge to work' (Drucker, 1993).

The question was how knowledge assets relate to productivity and innovation, but the

instrumental relations between knowledge and productivity/innovation remained unillustrated.

Knowledge was later seen as 'more valuable and more powerful than natural resources, big factories, or fat bankrolls '(Stewart, 1997).

In IC and knowledge theories, knowledge is connected to labor and employment (P. Brown, Hesketh, & Wiliams, 2003), but the notion of organizational knowledge is more pronounced than individual knowledge causing troubles to find and identify knowledge in IC (J. Mouritsen, Bukh, & Marr, 2004). In KM, knowledge is predominantly defined as subjective and tacit knowledge (Nonaka, Toyama, & Hirata, 2008). Research has focused on explications of tacit knowledge through models like SECI (Nonaka, Toyama, & Konno, 2002) and constructs like Communities of Practice (Gammelgaard, 2010; Wenger, 1998), but dynamics in operations problematize the outcome from the models (Duguid, 2005) and points out the unknown relations between knowledge decisions and ostensive representations of knowledge, but also the unsolved relationship between knowledge and operations.

The distinction between situated, organizational knowledge on the one hand and the notion of individual knowledge (K. Kreiner, 2002; Polanyi, 1974) in a generic context on the other, seems important when trying to identify design elements for technologies providing reliable, updated and accessible information about available individual knowledge. Twenty years ago the same context produced research that envisaged effects of new technological achievements for

distribution of knowledge in and between companies (J. S. Brown & Duguid, 1998)pointing out an awaited loss of control over the distribution of knowledge in companies. Within the firms the effects also represented loss of money, because firms pay the salaries but do not harvest effects from coordination of knowledge. Technological connectivity may take the research focus to collaborating networks, by some researchers referred to as IC ecosystems when applying

8 A 1.1 IC Literature Review

34

sectorial, regional or country levels as research focus, thus surpassing firm boundaries (Borin &

Donato, 2015). Between firms, the inexistence of bottom-lines reduces the problem of

coordination of knowledge to the search for and match of the most satisfying knowledge in the asymmetric situation of task information, because tasks being owned within companies define the demand for knowledge, while the globally distributed individual supplier of knowledge own specific knowledge, but does not know the demand. As a starting point, no financial constrains rule the potential connection and relationship between supply and demand for individual knowledge.

It is assumed that whether the task is supply or demand for HC in or between firms, then the properties of information needed for reliable, updated and accessible information about available individual knowledge is identical, if an unbiased, reliable overview, choice and connection to the concrete intellectual capacities is to be technically provided, decisions made and knowledge managed at a distance. This is because the quality of the HC match is equally dependent of precision and reliability when searching for or offering individual IC capacity and because firms’ legal/economic boundaries do not impeach exchange of knowledge. Management of knowledge, thus, not only matches between supply and demand of knowledge, is within companies assumed to create other implications, because financial bottom lines represent the summarized economic result of many decisions within co-cognitive, strategic, ordered organizational contexts with common long /short termed goals comprising not only matches between supply and demand, but also long termed maintenance and development of the HC.

For management of innovation the theorizing of individual knowledge is indirectly assigned an important role, because innovative processes are described as dependent of individual

knowledge (D. J. Teece, 2010; D. J. Teece, 2007; Tushman, Anderson, & O’Reilly, 1997;

Tushman et al., 2010). The important role was not generally outlined in first waves of the IC literature (Andriessen, 2004b; Bounfour, 2003; Bukh et al., 2001; Bukh, Skovvang Christensen,

& Mouritsen, 2005; Busco, Frigo, Riccaboni, & Quattrone, 2013; Edvinsson & Sullivan, 1996;

J. Mouritsen, Larsen, & Bukh, 2001; J. Mouritsen et al., 2004) although individually defined knowledge resources were identified and found to be assets quite early (Allee, 2002; Nonaka, 1994; Saint-Onge, 1996; Sveiby & Lloyd, 1987). But this stream of research did not gain solid ground for the next 20 years, maybe due to contingency based theories in management

accounting (Otley, 2003) and maybe because knowledge in KM ontologically is defined as subjective (Konno & Nonaka, 1998; Nonaka et al., 2008). David Otley exerted self-critique by identifying some elements as generic (Otley, 2003). The subjective notion of knowledge was criticized especially pointing out inconvenient consequences for remote sharing of knowledge and for innovation (Gourlay, 2006; Hong, 2012).

Having been based mainly on subjective knowledge and notions of knowledge intermingling knowledge and competences, IC literature therefore exposes flaws for the sharing of individual knowledge, which is not co-present (Nonaka et al., 2002), and documents difficulties for teamwork in cross-bordering teams (Behfar, 2008; Cordery, Morrison, Wright, & Wall, 2010;

Hardless, 2007a; Harvard Business Review Press, 2011; Hong & Vai, 2008; Kirkman, Rosen, Tesluk, & Gibson, 2004; Maznevski & Chudoba, 2000; Wilson, Straus, & McEvily, 2006). How

35

objectify individual knowledge, when it is intermingled with the human competence to activate and use knowledge?

The concept for the IC review (Webster & Watson, 2002; Wee & Banister, 2016) will therefore focus on literature’s approach to mechanisms of coordination and distribution of assets in and between firms.