Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is the coding, collecting, development, sharing and enactment of knowledge practices in an organization. Knowledge management covers a wide variety of organizational programs, technologies, and human interaction relating to knowledge. Because knowledge is complex, with varying definitions across tacit and explicit, object and process, individual and collective, the approaches to knowledge management by organizational communication scholars also vary significantly. Knowledge is enacted communicatively, so organizational communication scholars examine knowledge management from a communicative perspective. Approaches include analyzing technological systems for storing and retrieving information, networks, communities of practice, and transactive memory systems for communicatively enacting knowledge and knowledge management. Communication research should further refine social capital measurements and identify organizational practices that strengthen social capital.