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Comput Math Organ Theory (2008) 14: 5255
DOI 10.1007/s10588-008-9020-8
BOOK REVIEW
Mark E. Nissen: Harnessing Knowledge Dynamics: Principled Organizational Knowing & Learning
IRM Press, Hershey, PA, 2006 Timothy N. Carroll
Published online: 29 January 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Scholars and managers alike recognize the critical role that knowledge plays in organizations. Drucker, who coined the term knowledge worker in the 1950s, called knowledge the only meaningful resource (Drucker 1993) that organizations possess. Nonaka regarded knowledge as the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage (1991). And Davenport recently (2005) stated that there is no business or economic issue that is more important to our long-term competitiveness and standard of living than making knowledge workers more productive.
Despite this broad realization many, perhaps most, organizations do not effectively manage knowledge or knowledge workers. Organizations fall short for several reasons. Managers, for example, may promote structures and processes that result in organizational silos that restrict, rather than promote, knowledge ow. Or managers may equate knowledge management with larger databases or other IT approaches that ignore the human side of knowledge creation and transmission. Finally, some problems are related to the nature of knowledgeit tends to be unevenly distributed throughout the organization and may have a tendency to stay where it is rather than move to where it is needed.
Mark Nissen addresses all of these issues effectively in his timely new book. Nissen takes a multidisciplinary approach and focuses on one aspect of knowledge managementthe movement or ow of knowledge. The book combines insights from academic work in Management Information Systems, Organization Behavior, Operations Management, and Strategic Management. Nissens book achieves a difcult balance between the rigor of academic work and the focus on application of a practitioner perspective.
T.N. Carroll ( )
University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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The book is divided into two sections. Section I (Intellectual Basis) provides the academic, research oriented justication for a set of thirty knowledge-ow principles. These principles are then applied in Section II (Practical Application) of the book to managerial problems via a set of diverse (business, government, military, and non-prot) case studies. The resulting managerial insights are summarized by a complementary set of thirty mandates.
Chapter 1 begins with...