“The Psychology of Knowledge Management: a discursive study of the influencing factors in knowledge enablement in western work environments with the aim of reaching a new framework for the accomplishment of knowledge capital.”
Study Aims
The study aims to develop a new framework for the accomplishment of knowledge capital within western organisations. Whilst in the tradition of discourse psychology studies, there are no fixed research questions at the outset, there are a number of indicative research questions:
- What does “knowledge capital” (traditionally known as knowledge management) mean to participants?
- What are the processes involved in knowledge enablement and what are the objectives from both a personal and an institutional perspective?
- What are the perceived institutional barriers and enabling factors to successful knowledge enablement and what are the measures used to identify success?
- What are the perceived personal barriers and enabling factors?
- Is there an institution vs. personal participant dichotomy?
What is new about this particular study is the application of a discourse psychology approach to the study of knowledge capital within organisations.
A secondary aim of the study is to address the difficulties surrounding definition and nomenclature, not by adopting terminologies used in the current literature, but through an analysis of participants’ discourse. Thus, the study aims to address the language of knowledge through the actions of knowledge participants.
Objective 1:
A literature review will form the study’s secondary research. This will:
- Identify, specify and describe the current body of knowledge in the principle domains of:
- knowledge management (knowledge capital, intellectual capital, knowledge enablement) and,
- discourse psychology approaches to human interaction.
- Identify any gaps in the current knowledge.
- Identify tensions, ambiguities and weaknesses in the current knowledge.
- This, in turn, will help to establish a scope and structure for the new study through the identification of emerging themes and issues.
- Enable the aims of the study to be located within the current literature.
Objective 2:
Primary research will be used to:
- Critically evaluate current practices and research.
- Identify emerging themes and issues for comparison and analysis with those arising from the literature.
- Analyse the actions in talk of participants to inform the study on:
- Meaning and influences, and in particular, tensions between personal and institutional perspectives;
- Barriers and enabling factors;
- Human participation in process and personal affecting factors.
- Inform the development of a new framework for knowledge capital which places the human dimension to the fore and which is situated within the discourse psychology paradigm.
The research philosophy takes an inductive, ethnomethodological approach:
- The strategy is to adopt Potter and Wetherell’s model of discourse psychology as the method of research. This will require observation, interview and recording of participants’ talk in interaction.
- This approach is grounded in the postmodernist epistemology which sees knowledge as something which is constructed as opposed to being discovered .
- Knowledge is a commodity that is constructed by people interacting with people. Consequently, it is the rationale of this study that in order to understand how knowledge capital is created, shared, evolved and applied, it is people’s talk in interaction – their actions performed through talk – which should be the focus of study.
- The selected research method also recognises people’s individual differences. In the postmodernist critical social psychology tradition, this fundamental feature of humans makes quantitative methods obsolete in the study of human behaviour.
- Additionally, this tradition embraces the researcher as participant, avowing that there can be no such thing as an objective observer. The mere act of observation can influence the direction of action. This casts doubt on the efficacy of quantitative methods in the study of human knowledge behaviours.
- This approach has been criticised for being openly subject to researcher bias and at risk of being invalid. With respect to the latter criticism, discourse psychology makes no claims to attempt to generalise its findings to the population at large. Rather, it is a method of building successfully on previous findings with the aim of developing a substantive and rich literature covering all facets of human behaviour. With respect to the former issue, researcher bias may be addressed by being explicit and open in discussion of findings and through the use of talk abstracts in support of the arguments.
Objective 3:
The study’s outcome aims to deliver:
- A new framework for understanding and enabling the human behavioural and interactional dimension of knowledge capital within western organisations which is based on an analysis and evaluation of the findings of the primary research.
- A study clearly located within the context of the current literature, highlighting its original contribution to the knowledge and its efficacy for practitioners in the domain of knowledge capital.
