Bandwidth

“The major explanation for the lack of productive cooperation between the universities is to be found in their sense of competition with one another”.

A fascinating article by Collins (1974) offers insights about how knowledge diffuses across practitioners of common scientific craft but also how they don’t truly trust one another.  I could contrast that with last week’s observations about trust and hiding information, which Collins highlights in his writing: “These include the overt concealment of information by scientists who feel that they are in competition with others…”

“What you publish in an article is always enough to show that you’ve done it, but never enough to enable anyone else to do it.  If they can do it then they know as much as you do”.

One’s perception of the degree of competition versus cooperation in a ‘partner’ then becomes the basis for limiting or facilitating knowledge diffusion.  Chen, et al., write about the use of strategic alliances to “transfer knowledge to entities outside organizational boundaries becomes central to firm success and affects key organizational outcomes”.  The irony is that Chen, et al. talk about how partnering strengthens both the relationship and through knowledge transfer, the trust on both sides.  Collins is busy pointing out that Universities are busy thinking they are all in competition with one another, so there is little trust and not much transfer of knowledge in their written materials.  Stephen Antczak makes the same point here and here.   Institutions of higher learning maybe but not so much on collaboration.  Collins goes on to talk about sets of people and that these ‘social circles’ of scientists sharing a craft (Collins referred to it as a paradigm) possess a set of technological, tacit knowledge which is not written down amongst the population of the set.  Chen makes the explicit statement that “strategic alliances are an important vehicle for firms to acquire outside knowledge for improving their competitive advantages”.  Clearly a level of trust is required to make this work because what we see in Collins’ paper is a distinct description of anything but that.

Yuan, et al., talk about the technologies that seem to facilitate knowledge transfer.  Between Collins’ example of sharing with little trust and Chen’s study of firms teaming together to bolster their competitive strengths, we seem to have a wide spectrum.  Yuan and team mention that various technologies for knowledge transfer suffer from the same issues of trust and detail that humans have always had and technology does not really change that.  However, technology can foster improved transfer across cultures and within a ‘set’ of people if properly harnessed to the community.  If the employees have too many technological choices in documenting their knowledge, then silos of information are created and no one finds anything.  Yuan’s results would seem to confirm those of Schillewaert (see previous post) about why people continue to use technology; that is, “… all tools have an active user base … and helped to reduce at least one of the three challenges for knowledge sharing”.

What did I get out of all this?  What is the lesson to be learned here?  I think that the tacit, technological knowledge is indeed the purview of the people between whom the knowledge is being shared and their perceptions of trust and motivations for sharing completely affect the rate at which that knowledge is transferred. Hank Langford’s post also goes to this point, but not directly.   In effect, humans control the bandwidth of the information being transmitted.

Chen, C.-J., Hsiao, Y.-C. & Chu, M.-A. (2014). Transfer mechanisms and knowledge transfer: The cooperative competency perspective. Journal of Business Research, 67, 2531–2541. doi: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2014.03.011

Collins, H. M. (1974). The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks. Science Studies , 4, 165-185.

Schillewaert, N., Ahearne, M. J., Frambach, R. T. & Moenaert, R. K. (2005). The adoption of information technology in the sales force. Industrial Marketing Management, 34, 323–336. doi: 10.1016/j.indmarman.2004.09.013

Yuan, Y. C., Zhao, X., Liao, Q. & Chi, C. (2013). The use of different information and communication technologies to support knowledge sharing in organizations: From e-mail to micro-blogging. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64, 1659–1670. doi: 10.1002/asi.22863