Research pick: Nebulous knowledge management - "Why is there no consensus on what knowledge management is?"

Knowledge management is one of those nebulous phrases that means different things to different people. Multiplicity of meaning and ambiguity of definition leads to much debate among those involved in organisational life charged with planning strategy, managing information, and in other areas broadly related to the term. A new bibliographic survey published in the International Journal of Knowledge Management Studies reveals why there is no consensus on the meaning of this term and looks outward with a new definition that might be adopted widely.

Technical terms and jargon can become meaningless in organisational use where there is no objective definition. Moreover, with use there is abuse and one organisation’s definition may well conflict with that of another, so where research across disciplines and organisations is carried out a buzzword or technical phrase used in one context may be invalid in another. Ambiguity and confusion arise and the research literature becomes sullied and distorted by subjectivity.

Fábio Corrêa of FUMEC University in Brazil, and colleagues, explain how when isolated technical terms are simplified, their full meaning is often lost and so when two or more such terms are then brought together, the neologism that is born is also oversimplified and so can have even less meaning or be wholly ambiguous. The phrase knowledge management suffers from this simplification phenomenon.

Knowledge can be a true and justified belief, a set of experiences, values, contextual information and insights, a personal abstraction of an experience. Management is synonymous with administration but is also about the execution of roles and the fulfillment of objectives in many different spheres. Bring the two together and the phrase is diffuse, to say the least. The researchers’ through their survey of the literature suggest that we need to take a step back from the phrase and define more subjectively its components in order to allow ourselves to redefine in a more objective, rather than wholly subjective, manner the phrase. By taking such an approach it might then be possible to reach a consensus on exactly what we mean by “knowledge management”.

Corrêa, F., Paula, C.P.A.d., Carvalho, D.B.F. and Anastácio, M.F. (2022) ‘Why is there no consensus on what knowledge management is?’, Int. J. Knowledge Management Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp.90–109.