To be a manager is to be responsible for getting work done within the boundaries of a certain organisational setting. This may be a crude definition of a manager’s job. It is simple enough, even simplistic, but one that is valid for the purpose of this review as well as for practical descriptive purposes in general. For specifically analytical purposes, however, it is not adequate. Although the “essence” of managing does not vary from one situation to another, as the above definition would suggest, its manifestation in practice varies a great deal across organisations and cultures as these change from one era to another.
Paradigms develop from time to time, place to place, to explain some of these variations. Paradigm shifts not only reflect changes in the sense theorists or modellers make of the reality of managerial practice but also are an expression of how such reality changes as circumstances, and the way they are perceived, change. To make things even more complicated, subjectivity enters the scene and affects how management is modelled in the context of any given time and place. The role that variables like culture, ideology, world view, attitudes, gender and social reference groups play in constraining the modelling process and its outcome should not be underestimated. Hence, different schools of thought tend to lay different emphases on different facets of what we might call the “institution of management’, due to subjective variations deeply rooted in relative ontological, epistemological, axiological and methodological assumptions.
Bryan Gladstone’s book, From Know‐How to Knowledge: The Essential Guide to Understanding and Implementing Knowledge Management, does not explicitly claim to offer a new comprehensive paradigm for management as such but it does come close to doing so; the promise is already made in the foreword. Alan Taylor suggests that knowledge management (KM) is the next management paradigm, replacing transformation strategies such as total quality management and business process reengineering. The proposed paradigm gathers its strength from the ever‐increasing emphasis on the value of knowledge highlighted in contemporary literature and research, both at the micro and macro levels of analysis. The socio‐economic value of “intellectual capital” for organizations (as well as individuals) in today’s society is an obvious example. The proposed new paradigm derives its credibility from the value attached to knowledge as a prerequisite for success in managing all kinds of postmodern organisational settings – from “learning organisations” to the “knowledge economies” of entire nations – through a successful integration of people, processes and technology.
Even new paradigms have auspices. As soon as one starts reading From Know‐How to Knowledge one finds that it is deeply embedded in a solid, techno‐centric, “positivistic” frame of reference. It goes without saying that one’s reaction to this will depend on who one is and what school of thought one belongs to as well as one’s purpose in reading the book. If one is inclined to “poststructuralist”, “postpositivist”, or “postmodernist” tendencies that are suspicious of the KM school of thought one will be dismayed by the book’s claims to novelty. In this respect, From Know‐How to Knowledge is rather descriptive and too linear in terms of proposing a single, rather simplistic and “all‐encompassing” transformation strategy for the “twenty‐first century manager”. Naturally, this will not satisfy one’s desire for a more comprehensive package of factors that present people, their issues, problems and organisational politics, as the most challenging element in managing a successful integration of people, processes and technology. In this respect, one would probably regard the proposed paradigm as yet another “neo‐structuralist” or “neo‐functionalist” manifestation of new phase management as an institution for maintaining dominance in the twenty‐first century. It is a good example of the lack of fixity of a whole institution whose mission is to assume responsibility for getting work done. It can be dressed up in a certain fashion, using the KM hat in this case, to make it look like considerate knowledge for conscientious people, attractive as a fashion, yet nonetheless so naive and so apolitical in nature.
It might be objected that the paradigm does consider the dimension of power and empowerment in organisational life. Agreed – up to a point. But the proposed paradigm shift from know‐how to knowledge does not do so sufficiently. For example, Gladstone distinguishes between information and knowledge in terms of what constitutes each of them but stops short of addressing, in any direct manner, the implications of such a distinction for managing. While identifying the need for a new kind of politics to suite the emerging “virtual shop floor”, as opposed to the “real shop floor”, he does not discuss ways of modelling or implementing “virtual politics”. Managing people, and other resources, and being responsible, in whatever capacity, for the well being of entire organisations, requires a realistic paradigm. Such a paradigm should explicitly depict the politically conscious character of managerial skills vital for directing, organising and controlling organisation work, regardless of how technology‐intensive or knowledge‐intensive it happens to be.
One might read From Know‐How to Knowledge because one is a practising manager who intends to learn about new currents in management thinking that stress the value of knowledge as a “justified belief” for managers. From this perspective, one is in for an experience that is potentially “indoctrinating”. Gladstone brooks no doubt: KM is the way, the truth, the light and the future. To be sure, such a reading of the book is useful if it contributes to shaping a new kind of culture in the profession (if management could be called a profession) or practice of management, in which knowledge is admired and its value respected. From a practical management point of view, if we were to equate knowledge with power, this is important because it points to the way that knowledge is always something known and it signifies that its being known by anyone other than management loosens their grip over those managed. Tendencies to globalization of operations and postmodernization of practice being flatter, faster, closer to the customer, more immediate, more virtual (and less real) will only accentuate the power of this cleavage. On the one hand there is management and on the other hand knowledge, its “knowers” and known, the latter a trinity that slips further away from management’s immediate grasp – and handling that capacity which was the original etymological meaning of management. Regardless of the number of viewpoints and approaches to KM that will undoubtedly emerge, the book under consideration indicates two basic assumptions about the KM promise. First, knowledge is an increasingly vital asset that must be managed; second, the most basic quality of KM is to provide the right knowledge to the right people in the right form. It must, in other words, be subject to management control – the liberal vision of knowledge as enlightenment must be surrendered to the conservative vision of knowledge as control.
Once upon a time knowledge as control was simple: face‐to‐face, direct or technically scoped through instrumental control or rational rules and like devices for ensnaring routines. Now, if it is true that KM is crucial for postmodern, at a distance, virtual organisational survival it is equally true that KM is a difficult task requiring large expenditures of resources. Information technology solutions – such as e‐mail, document management and intranet – are useful and increasingly justifiable given the trends towards virtuality. However, new techniques and tools more oriented towards knowledge – appropriately called knowledge technology – are now being promoted as vital to help managers make the most out of the KM promise. These also reveal the magnitude of management problems associated with the growth of the prominence of KM in terms of the challenging and time‐consuming tasks of systematic documentation, distribution and re‐use of knowledge – all necessary if control is to be successfully asserted.
In short, From Know‐How to Knowledge will help carve a way of thinking that fits with managers’ collective memory, whereby shared meanings can be exchanged and new instrumental and symbolic roles created. It is definitely useful reading in that respect as it provides managers with a sense of direction and practical advice about why and how they should use and manage knowledge to achieve a more efficient and competitive performance in virtual times. KM is becoming an increasingly pervasive subject within the business community as more and more large organisations become aware of the importance of knowledge and regard it as a most important asset. In this respect, Bryan Gladstone’s book will contribute to shaping the future culture of management by addressing the management control issues and challenges of the first decade of the twenty‐first century in the light of current advancements in information and communication technologies and processes.
One can enjoy this book and benefit from it on many levels as a researcher: it has a practical, “how‐to” dimension that will be appreciated immensely by practising managers. For more critical scholars it makes evident the old dimensions underlying the new rhetoric. Perhaps it will help to lay a foundation for future work that will stress the pivotal role of learning and knowledge not only in managing for success in the narrow business sense of the word but, more broadly, in managing for success in life as a whole – and that way, perhaps, lies the vision of another kind of enlightenment.
