Introduction

Abstract

Since Spender and Grant’s (1996) outstanding review of knowledge as a resource in strategic management, international business and management researchers have become greatly interested in knowledge as an asset and a resource. Management and organization theory researchers have followed Polanyi’s (1966) distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is codified knowledge and thus similar to information (Spender and Grant, 1996). Tacit knowledge is more difficult to formalize, impart, exchange, or purchase because it resides in people’s beliefs, experiences, values, organizational routines, and institutions (Inkpen, 1996). Polanyi (1966) termed the pre-logical phase of knowing as ‘tacit knowledge’ in stating that ‘we can know more than we can tell’. Yet the intangible nature of tacit knowledge does not diminish the vital part played by tacit knowledge in knowledge generation, transfer and dissemination (Senker, 1995).

All that is alive tends toward colour, individuality, specificity, effectiveness, and opacity: all that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality, transfiguration, and transparency.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)