Belief revision and organisational knowledge dynamics
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Belief revision and organisational knowledge dynamics G Tselekidis1, P Peppas2* and M-A Williams3 1
University of Patras, Patras, Greece; 2AIT-Athens Information Technology, Athens, Greece; and 3University of Technology, Sydney, Australia It is widely accepted nowadays that the ability of a firm to display sustained competitive advantage, relies heavily on its efficiency in managing organisational knowledge, and keeping it up-to-date with internal and external developments. It is therefore imperative to develop a deeper understanding of organisational knowledge evolution. In this paper, we propose the use of methods and techniques from the area of Belief Revision in studying organisational knowledge dynamics. Belief Revision lies at the intersection of Formal Philosophy and Computer Science, and studies the process by which a rational agent changes her beliefs in the light of new information. The formal models that have been developed in this area are intuitive and elegant, and in this paper we show how they can be imported into the context of organisational knowledge management. Journal of the Operational Research Society (2003) 54, 914–923. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601592 Keywords: organisational studies; management; dynamic capabilities; artificial intelligence
Introduction The issue of sustained competitive advantage has been widely discussed in the management literature. What makes certain organisations display a sustained competitive advantage? In an effort to answer this question, many recent approaches to management reconsider the notion of a ‘firm’. Empirical research has shown that firms in the same environment had widely varying levels of performance.1 This means that firm resources are more significant than industry effects. One way to explore the performance implications of firmspecific capabilities is through the resource-based view of the firm.2,3 More specifically, competitive advantage is most likely to result from the development of unique asset stocks that are built up through an ongoing process of critical resource accumulation.4 One kind of unique asset stocks especially contributing to the sustainable competitive advantage of firms follows from the creation, ownership, protection and use of difficult-toimitate knowledge assets.5 This conclusion in turn leads us to a knowledge-based view of the firm. According to the knowledge-based view, the capability to create and utilise knowledge is the most important source of a firm’s sustainable competitive advantage. Consequently, a firm has a competitive advantage when it can create, utilise and maintain knowledge, over time, more effectively than its competitors.6,7 The notion of knowledge evolution also appears in Belief Revision, an area in the intersection of Formal Philosophy *Correspondence: P Peppas, Athens Information Technology, Markopoulou Avenue, Peania, Athens 19002, Greece. E-mail: [email protected]
and Computer Science. The concept at focus in
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