1. Much of the emphasis on organizational knowledge today (at least in terms of practice) is focused on efforts to capture, screen, store and codify knowledge. To get a more popular view of what many organizations are doing under the rubric of knowledge management we suggest some of the following publications: T. Davenport & L. Prusak, Working Knowledge (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1998); C. O’Dell & C. J. Grayson, If Only We Knew What We Know (New York, NY: Free Press, 1998); T. Stewart, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1997); and R. Ruggles, “The State of the Notion: Knowledge Management in Practice,” California Management Review, 1998, 40(3), 80–89.
2. Of course, our own perspective is that knowledge embedded in human networks is too often overlooked in these initiatives. Two streams of literature heavily influenced our thinking here. First is the rich ethnographic evidence accumulating within the situated learning and community of practice traditions. This work is making clear the large degree to which people learn how to do their work not from impersonal sources of information but through interactions with other people. Some important work in this tradition includes: J. S. Brown & P. Duguid, “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning and Innovation,” Organization Science, 1991, 2(1), 40–57; J. Brown & P. Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000); J. Lave & E. Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); J. Orr, Talking About Machines (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); and E. Wenger, Communities of Practice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998).
3. The second stream of literature influential in our thinking came from the social network tradition, which has also shown, with very different methods, the extent to which information that affects what we do largely comes from other people. Some important works on how social networks influence information flow and diffusion in networks include: G. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York, NY: Free Press, 1950); R. Burt, Structural Holes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); M. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology, 1973, 78, 1360–1380; T. Allen, Managing the Flow of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); P. Monge & N. Contractor, “Emergence of Communication Networks,” forthcoming in F. Jablin and L. Putnam (Eds.), Handbook of Organizational Communication, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage); and E. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 4th ed. (New York, NY: Free Press, 1995).