CENTRAL TO THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
DOMAIN IS THE NEED TO BALANCE
ORGANISATIONAL CONTROL AND SLACK
What is Knowledge management?
First of all we have to define what is knowledge management.
Knowledge1 is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and
expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new
experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of 'knowers'. In
organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but
also in organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms.
Difference between control and slack
Within these definition we have to difference organizational control and slack.
ORGANIZATIONAL CONTROL: Knowledge management theory borrows from
theories of organizational structure, and develops several important new ideas that can
improve our understanding of such structures. An example of one of these borrowed
theories is the goal-seeking imperative of organizational design. The knowledge
management field uses these theories to form an overarching class of concepts that
refine and extend the idea of the goal-seeking imperative.
SLACK: The term slack coined by (Cyert and March, 1963:42) was defined as “the
difference between total resources and total necessary payments”. This difference is the
amount of excess resources above the minimum necessary to produce a given level of
output, (Nohria and Gulati, 1996) and referred by (Libenstein, 1969) as X-inefficiency.
This represents uncommitted resources (Rodgers, 1995) such as unused capacity,
unnecessary capital expenditures, excess inputs and redundant employees as well as
unexploited opportunities, (Nohria and Gulati, 1996). These resources are “potentially
utilizable resources that can be diverted or redeployed for the achievement of
organizational goals”(George, 2005:661). Because slack involves the firm using more
resources than necessary economists such as (Libenstein, 1969) and Williamson
( 1963,1964) see it as a waste of resources and a sign of managerial self-interest and
agency which can be more properly corrected through the structuring of organisational
incentives.
The key objective of Knowledge Management is to enhance knowledge processing.
The field of knowledge management contributes several recent models of the
knowledge creation process. A well-known example proceeds from the various
collaborations of Gunnar Hedlund and Ikujiro Nonaka. The picture abobe illustrates the
model of organizational knowledge creation process, adapted here from Nonaka &
Takeuchi (1995, p. 84)2. Tacit knowledge is socialized into the organization from its
customers and knowledge alliance partners. This knowledge is processed iteratively
through five processes as tacit knowledge is articulated/externalized and combined to
support a product or service output of the organization. In this sense, externalization is
the process by which tacit knowledge is transformed into articulated knowledge and
internalization is the reverse process. Several important prerequisite conditions are
notable for enabling the process. These manifest a knowledge culture by investing the
individuals with a degree of autonomy, and providing a degree of redundancy in the
MARTA ABENGOCHEA CORBÍ
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
1
1 Davenport TH and Prusak L (1998) Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage
What They Know. Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA.
2 Nonaka I and Takeuchi H (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese
Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Oxford University Press, New York
