The 7th annual European Conference on Knowledge Management 2006 held in Budapest produced a particularly interesting set of papers. KM as a field of academic endeavor continues to produce signs of maturity in the sense that the quality of contributions is markedly higher than in the past. But the tendency to fracture along multiple disciplinary boundaries remains.
The result is that selecting papers from the conference for inclusion in the Journal is more challenging than ever. Fourteen papers were chosen in the end however, and these from a wide range of authors based in Universities around the world.
Topics addressed by papers included in this edition are especially eclectic which, given KM´s multidisciplinary roots and transversal nature, reflects the multiplicity of the basic phenomenon (human and collective cognition, secondarily applied to organizational contexts). In some respects this characteristic is frustrating but also challenging, and there are researchers who find this motivating. Perhaps because the intellectual perimeters are multiple and loose. Perhaps because paradigms shift by traversing a path of intellectual mosaics.
On the other hand the fact is that after about two decades of serious research by the academic community KM is - at best - showing only weak signs of convergence. If maturing in terms of quality and productivity, it remains young in terms of disciplinary comportment. I once listened to a French cultural anthropologist explain to a French television crew why he had chosen to live and work in the United States (his business being to de-code European culture for the American marketing machine).
He told them that European culture was an old culture with its codes well sorted and established. He characterized American cultural codes as young, searching and mixed, not unlike adolescents the world over no matter what their national origin. In the end he explained that after weighing the pros and cons he finally decided that he thoroughly preferred being mixed up with the young and the restless. The freedom and frontiers of youth being "better" than the standards and strictures of establishment.
