Power Issues in Knowledge Management

Abstract

Knowledge management was advanced in the early 1990’s as a new managerial reform suited to the rapidly changing and globally vast business environment. These reformers encouraged managers to treat as a critical source their employees’ knowledge, of which they themselves had minimally articulated and varying conceptions. The major common feature among these conceptions was their generally cognitive, epistemological, and often individualistic approach to the question of knowledge, which dispossesses them of other important issues, most notably “power.” Adopting a sociological approach in this paper, will reexamine issues of knowledge management, especially as they relate to power relationships inside and outside organizations. We apply a refined version of Foucault’s notion of a “regime of truth” to show the institutionally-specific processes, procedures, and mechanisms that are usually at work in the creation of statements about the social world that function as true. As examples, we distinguish three regimes of truth that, we argue, are at work in the functioning of publicly traded businesses in the U.S. — the financial reporting, analysts’ research, and business press regimes of truth. A brief look at knowledge-management literature will further manifest a fourth regime of scholarly research. The close examination of these multiple regimes will lead us to the overall conclusion that power relationships can systematically influence the statements about the social world that function as true. In the latter part of the paper, we will study the implications of this observation for the theory and practice of knowledge management.