Knowledge Management as Technology: Making Knowledge Manageable

Knowledge and technology are celebrated as the twin sources of competitive advantage in modern economies. To make knowledge and technology available to deliberate organizational action (to turn such sources into resources, as it were) is a current task for every manager – from the corporate top to the project level. But what are these resources that managers attempt to manage? And how are they made manageable? We will ponder these questions below in an attempt to understand the phenomenon of knowledge management in modern organizations. For a start, let us clarify our use of the central concepts, knowledge, technology and management. In some sense technology and knowledge must be conceptually very similar. It is probably uncontroversial to claim that technology is a form of knowledge. Recall that ‘logos’ in Greek philosophy was “the divine reason implicit in and governing the cosmos.”1 Presently, as a suffix (-logy) it denotes knowledge about a specific domain of cosmos – which is, in the case of technology, “tekhne” – the art and craft of producing something. We may think of technology as the body of knowledge that underlie the systematic application of tools and skills “according to a pragmatic instrumental rationality”.2 It is probably slightly more controversial to posit that knowledge is a form of technology, since this may suggest that knowledge is crafted and produced – by managers or researchers, as the case may be. We don’t mean to stir a paradigmatic war and merely observe that at least some part of the reality that organizations need to know about in order to perform well, must first be made knowable. The preferences of the market, or the resourcefulness of the context, are not immediately observable goads for organizational decision-making – and to the extent that they do in fact serve as premises for