Organisational Knowledge

Abstract

While the works reviewed in Chapter 2 can help us to comprehend the concept of tacit knowledge more fully, the majority deal with tacit knowledge at the individual level. This is important, but what may be more interesting is tacit knowledge at the organisational level - that is, tacit knowledge as a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Individual tacit knowledge can disappear when the individuals who hold the knowledge leave the organisation. It is easily transferable, ‘moving with the person, [and thus] giving rise to potential problems of retention’ (Lam, 2000, p. 491). This makes the organisation vulnerable to the loss of tacit knowledge to competitors. Furthermore individuals ‘die off and their tacit knowledge dies with them’ (Boisot, 1998, p. 38). All this means that competitive advantage based on individual tacit knowledge is inherently precarious. This does not apply so strongly to organisational tacit knowledge as ‘such knowledge cannot be moved into an organisation without the transfer of clusters of individuals with established patterns of working together’ (Teece, 2000, p. 36).