Knowledge in an Electronic World ?

Abstract

Understanding the way human interaction and knowledge transfer work is a fundamental issue in KM. IT supported/assisted KM strategies face the question of the extent to which knowledge can be codified, programmed into software systems, stored, extracted, distributed, organized and managed electronically. This paper examines the possibility of translating theorems rooted in socio-linguistics, epistemology, psychology, philosophy and other human sciences into a concept that fits the paradigms used in information theory.

Information is defined as a >selection process< steered by four different types of commands: Selection requests, instructions, representation and interpretation modificators. >Selections< are assumed to be (true) knowledge under four conditions: Situational relatedness (situationedness of knowledge), supposition of reality-substantiality (sense making, belief, claim), conformity with patterns of social behaviour (culture, civilization, artificial world), integratability into the image of the relation between >self< and >world< (self-identity, Weltbild). Extraction, reconstruction of >knowledge< from protocols of thoughts and mental images is performed through the execution of internalized, learned selection/action patterns applied to individual life experience, and sense making understanding of a given situation.

The translation of the logical structure of >situational understanding<, >sense making< and >selection process< into a conventional representation of functional relations between elements of an organizational situation (information processing in/of organizations by means of IT) makes >sense< if the choice between options (transparency) of selections (the content of negotiation and calibration) leads to desirable flexibility of individuals and organizations in a globalized world.