John Seely Brown’s research while affiliated with Palo Alto Research Center and other places

An abstract is not available.

Over the past decade, knowledge and learning have emerged as the keys to economic success and as a focus for thinking about organizational effectiveness and innovation. An overwhelming majority of large organizations now engage in a wide range of knowledge and learning activities and nearly all have programs and personnel explicitly dedicated to these tasks. The volume is targeted at those new to knowledge and learning, and is filled with practical examples and focuses on the most critical issues, featuring seminal contributions from leading authorities including: * Thomas Davenport, * Dorothy Leonard, * John Seely Brown, * Sidney Winter, * W. Chan Kim, * Peter Druckard. The book is organized around the three key steps in managing knowledge: development, retention, and transfer. These sections are preceded by a section creating the strategic context for knowledge and followed by a section on the social dimensions that are often overlooked. Finally, the book looks to the future of knowledge and learning. This Reader is an accessible way for executives and students taking advanced Management Studies and executive courses to learn from the latest examples on this topic.

The ubiquity of information makes it easy to overlook the local character of innovative knowledge. Nowhere is this local character more overlooked yet paradoxically more evident than in Silicon Valley. The Valley persists as a densely interconnected innovative region, though its inhabitants loudly proclaim that the information technology they develop renders distance dead and place insignificant. It persists, we argue, because of the local character of innovative knowledge, which flows in social rather than digital networks. The locality of innovative knowledge highlights the challenge of developing other regions for the modern economy. Should these abandon traditional local strengths and strive to become another Silicon Valley? Or should they concentrate on their traditional strengths and rely on Silicon Valley and the other established high-tech regions to provide the necessary technology to survive in the digital age? We argue that they should do neither, but instead develop new technologies in service of their existing competencies and needs. Finding new ways to address indigenous problems is the right way, we believe, to tie to the region expertise, talent, and capital that might otherwise be lost to the lure of existing high-tech clusters.

For years pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate the need for everything from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. They have heralded the coming of the virtual office, digital butlers, electronic libraries, and virtual universities. Beaten down by info-glut and exasperated by computer systems with software crashes, viruses, and unintelligible error messages, individual users tend to wax less enthusiastic about technological predictions. Amid the hype and the never-narrowing gap between promise and performance, they find it hard to get a vision of the true potential of the digital revolution. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their book The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000) help us see through frenetic visions of the future to the real forces for change in society. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays in the world of bits, this book, and the chapters published here in First Monday, gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals. The authors show how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, knowledge, and judgement can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives.

An abstract is not available.

While the recent focus on knowledge has undoubtedly benefited organizational studies, the literature still presents a sharply contrasting and even contradictory view of knowledge, which at times is described as "sticky" and at other times "leaky." This paper is written on the premise that there is more than a problem with metaphors at issue here, and more than accounts of different types of knowledge (such as "tacit" and "explicit") can readily explain. Rather, these contrary descriptions of knowledge reflect different, partial, and sometimes "balkanized" perspectives from which knowledge and organization are viewed. Taking the community of practice as a unifying unit of analysis for understanding knowledge in the firm, the paper suggests that often too much attention is paid to the idea of community, too little to the implications of practice. Practice, we suggest, creates epistemic differences among the communities within a firm, and the firm's advantage over the market lies in dynamically coordinating the knowledge produced by these communities despite such differences. In making this argument, we argue that analyses of systemic innovation should be extended to embrace all firms in a knowledge economy, not just the classically innovative. This extension will call for a transformation of conventional ideas coordination and of the trade-off between exploration and exploitation.

How do schools help to create the kind of person a child becomes? Changing Classes tells the story of a small, poor, ethnically-mixed school district in Michigan's rust-belt, a community in turmoil over the announced closing of a nearby auto assembly plant. As teachers and administrators found ways to make schooling more relevant to working-class children, two large-scale school reform initiatives swept into town: the Governor's 'market-place' reforms and the National Science Foundation's 'state systemic initiative'. All this is set against the backdrop of the transformation to a global, post-Fordist economy. The result is an account of the complex linkages at work as society structures the development of children to adulthood.

Much current work on organizational knowledge, intellectual capital, knowledge-creating organizations, knowledge work, and the like rests on a single, traditional understanding of the nature of knowledge. We call this understanding the "epistemology of possession," since it treats knowledge as something people possess. Yet, this epistemology cannot account for the knowing found in individual and group practice. Knowing as action calls for an "epistemology of practice." Moreover, the epistemology of possession tends to privilege explicit over tacit knowledge, and knowledge possessed by individuals over that possessed by groups. Current work on organizations is limited by this privileging and by the scant attention given to knowing in its own right. Organizations are better understood if explicit, tacit, individual and group knowledge are treated as four distinct and coequal forms of knowledge (each doing work the others cannot), and if knowledge and knowing are seen as mutually enabling (not competing). We hold that knowledge is a tool of knowing, that knowing is an aspect of our interaction with the social and physical world, and that the interplay of knowledge and knowing can generate new knowledge and new ways of knowing. We believe this generative dance between knowledge and knowing is a powerful source of organizational innovation. Harnessing this innovation calls for organizational and technological infrastructures that support the interplay of knowledge and knowing. Ultimately, these concepts make possible a more robust framing of such epistemologically-centered concerns as core competencies, the management of intellectual capital, etc. We explore these views through three brief case studies drawn from recent research.