Part Special Issue Introduction: modelling organizational knowledge
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Part Special Issue Introduction: modelling organizational knowledge H Tsoukas1,2,* and N Mylonopoulos3 1
The George D. Mavros Research Professor of Organization and Management, Athens Laboratory Business Administration (ALBA), Greece; 2University of Strathclyde, Strathclyde, UK; and 3Athens Laboratory of Business Administration (ALBA), Greece Journal of the Operational Research Society (2003) 54, 911–913. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601585
Ever since the resource-based view of the firm has been put forward to explain the competitive advantage of firms, the issue of intangible firm assets has been the focus of several studies.1,2 According to this view, while physical resources continue to be of significance to a firm, what, however, is important for a sustained competitive advantage is the way a firm uses its human and organizational resources (its intangible resources). Such resources are unique to the firm — they are idiosyncratic — since they have been developed over time, in the particular circumstances facing a firm, as a result of particular choices made by a firm’s managers, and include webs of particular relationships (formal and informal) that have developed within the specific context of a firm. Intangible resources are largely knowledge-based: they incorporate knowledge concerning (a) what each individual knows and the skills they have, and (b) the formal systems and routines a firm has developed for organizing individuals and technology, as well as the informal ways of doing things (culture) that a firm has developed over time. Given that knowledge-based resources are distinctive to a firm (idiosyncratic), history-dependent and ambiguously related to firm performance, they are difficult to imitate and, insofar as this is the case, they are thought to give a firm a competitive advantage over its rivals.1 While there is no knowledge-based theory of the firm yet, a minimum number of inter-related assumptions inform the work of those researchers who study the organizational and economic significance of knowledge. Grant3 (p 138) has summarized these assumptions as follows: 1. Knowledge is the most important productive resource and a source of Ricardian rents. 2. Different types of knowledge differ in their transferability. *Correspondence: Dr H Tsoukas, The George D. Mavros Research Professor of Organization and Management, Athens Laboratory Business Administration (ALBA), Greece. E-mails: [email protected], [email protected]
3. Knowledge is subject to economies of scale and scope. 4. Knowledge is created by human beings who carry out work and interact in the context of social practices. 5. Several types of knowledge are required for the production of a good or service. If knowledge is the most important productive organizational resource (point 1), what exactly is organizational knowledge? For several researchers, the latter has been thought to be both a stock and a process. It is a stock insofar as it incl
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