Information Research Weblog

I managed to finish off Fuller's book on the Amsterdam trip. As Elena Maceviciute said in her review in Information Research, it is an interesting work. However, its subject is not related to the current 'knowledge management' fad, but to science and science research policy and the role of universities in public policy on science research. It also takes a position on the role of scientific publication and the various alternatives that exist in a world of electronic publishing. Peer review comes in for critical comment, as does Stephen Harnad's espousal of 'e-prints' as a way of ensuring readier and open access to the scholarly literature. Fuller also pays attention to the rise of expert systems, but here his treatment is very similar to that for 'knowledge management', to which I drew attention in the earlier message. That is, he gives very little support for the statements he makes about expert systems and, at times, he is simply wrong about them - for example, he claims:

Thus, although knowledge engineers have amassed a record of designing expert systems in medicine and psychiatry just as reditable as in librarianship and engineering, computerization has made greater inroads in the latter pair of weak professional fields.

He cites a 1987 reference in support of this, but I know of no expert systems in librarianship that have made any lasting impact on the field - although attention has been devoted to the possibility, especially in relation to cataloguing. Generally, in relation to expert systems, Fuller does not give supporting references or examples - another straw man built up to support a rather weak case.

All very interesting, but the newly appointed 'knowledge manager' in industry reaching for this book to discover what he is supposed to be doing is going to be disappointed.

The graph showing the growth of the literature on knowledge management has been updated slightly by confirming that there were 145 papers with this term in the title in 2002 - that is three more than the estimate given in November, which is a pretty good error rate :-)

Prompted by Elena Maceviciute's review in Information Research, I've been reading Steve Fuller's 'Knowledge management foundations'. Anyone coming to this book expecting to find some basic guidance on how to be a knowledge manager would certainly be disappointed. In fact, Fuller is a proponent of the idea of 'social epistemology' and this volume is one of a series that deal with the nature of science and scientific research as social phenomena within a social epistemology framework.

Interestingly, the term 'social epistemology' appears to have been coined by Margaret Egan and used by Shera and Egan in a paper in Library Quarterly in 1952. One is struck by the fact that the knowledge management literature - however the term is defined - appears to completely ignore the fact that librarians and information scientists have been wrestling with the underlying concepts for a great deal longer than the information systems and computer science communities. The re-invention of techniques under different headings - classification becomes ontologies, descriptive cataloguing and indexing become metatags, and so on - is a feature of this exclusion of the LIS literature from consideration in this sphere.

However, back to Fuller: like many other authors he fails to define exactly what he means by 'knowledge management' - his book is actually about the organization of scientific research and research and development in business organizations, although he also devotes attention to the nature of academic research and the role of the university in modern society. A section in the first chapter is headed 'Knowledge and information: the great bait and switch' and the first paragraph is worth quoting:

"Knowledge" and "information" have virtually had to reverse meanings to arrive at knowledge management's baseline assumptions. This transformation has removed much of the contemplative and even ethereal quality of classical philosophical conceptions of knowledge, thereby contributing to the incisive and critical spirit of knowledge managers. But at the same time, it has introduced a coarseness into the handling of its putative object, knowledge, often by reducing it to information. This should raise the alarm for those interested in the future of organized inquiry.

Indeed! Mind you - I'm not sure where he finds the 'incisive and critical spirit' because we have a phenomenon which is occasionally found in academic writing, although every academic would deplore it in a student :-) That is, the erection of a kind of 'straw king' (rather than a mere straw man} of knowledge management where opinions, positions, critical perceptions, etc. are attributed to 'knowledge management' or 'knowledge managers', but without any attribution to sources in the literature. Everything else is referenced, but citations are generally lacking for the points of view attributed to 'knowledge management'.

So - I'm reading this in a wary fashion and I'm just over half-way through. When I make it to the end I'll post my verdict.

Tom