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Sticky Knowledge: Barriers to Knowing in the Firm GABRIEL SZULANSKI. London: Sage, 2003. £18.99
It is unusual these days to see PhD theses being made into books. Gabriel Szulanski's doctoral project is one such exception. For those readers familiar with Szulanski's earlier work (Szulanski, 1996, 2000; Winter and Szulanski, 2001), this book may contain few surprises. But it is nonetheless a useful compilation of research into intra-firm knowledge transfers with a king-sized set of appendices as an extra incentive-no less than 48 out of 125 pages are dedicated to the fine details of the methodology Szulanski adopted in his study.
The premise underlying Szulanski's project is simple enough: knowledge transfer within firms is inhibited by factors other than poor incentives. Szulanski adopts and transforms Von Hippel's (1994) notion of stickiness: stickiness arises as a result of the characteristics of the knowledge transferred, the source, the recipient and the context where the transfer occurs. The framework underpinning this conceptualization of knowledge transfer is based on the seminal work of Shannon and Weaver (1949), which Szulanski claims is 'implicitly, if not explicitly, relied upon by most studies of knowledge transfer' (p. 59). Habitual readers of Management Learning may be legitimately disappointed with both this conceptualization and the absence of any discussion as to why it is worth pursuing a theoretical project based on this analogy.
The book is written in an accessible style and organized in an intuitive fashion. Chapter 1 introduces the key research question-why don't best practices spread?-and the structure...