To provide a typology of governance mechanisms for the analysis of knowledge exchange.
The methodology is to integrate various research in the social sciences and knowledge management and to provide a coherent and generic framework for the better understanding of knowledge transfer and exchange.
The existing literature on knowledge management could benefit more from incorporating more of the research methodologies of social anthropology.
There is a need to undertake empirical work and in‐depth case studies of the typology of knowledge exchange frameworks.
The intangibility of knowledge as a resource and asset requires the use of multiple frameworks of knowledge transfer and exchange in organizations as part of a knowledge management strategy.
The value of this paper is to knowledge management researchers on how to broaden the scope of existing knowledge management research through a greater integration with social science methodologies, especially social anthropology.
