Managing knowledge within and across geographic borders: the role of culture

✍ Scribed by Yukika Awazu

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 72 KB
• Volume: 14
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1092-4604
• DOI: 10.1002/kpm.288

✦ Synopsis

Knowledge management (KM) as a competitive capability has continuously received wide attention from both academic and practitioner communities. As tasks, work, and projects are increasingly conducted in globally distributed contexts, managing knowledge across boundaries becomes one of the biggest managerial challenges. Culture at the national, organizational, unit, and individual level plays a significant role by enhancing or suppressing KM programs. To date, research about culture and KM efforts in global contexts is scant. Organizational practices on culture and KM are often ad-hoc. Hence, research about culture and KM across boundaries is salient.

This special issue, 'Managing Knowledge Within and Across Geographic Borders: The Role of Culture,' aims to narrow the above gap. This special issue contains contributions that investigate the role of culture in global KM agendas from various angles such as globally distributed teams, subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs), innovation projects, and so on. Through these contributions, this special issue sheds light on the role of culture and raises more questions about what work is further needed to understand cultural issues in global KM contexts.

Eight contributions make up this special issue. The first two articles are in-depth case studies that discuss how global KM differs from institutional KM. Here, the concept of culture is considered at an interpersonal communication level. The next two articles are conceptual discussions of a managerial point of view of global KM and culture. The topics