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Volume 6 Issue 2
October 2008
One Size Does Not Fit All — Towards a Typology of Knowledge-centric Organisations
Marié Cruywagen1, Juani Swart2 and Wim Gevers1
1University of Stellenbosch Business School, Cape Town, South Africa
2School of Management, University of Bath, UK
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Organisations are increasingly turning their attention to the creation and use of knowledge
as a strategic resource. Too often however, knowledge management initiatives fail to produce
the competitive advantage expected from a strategic resource. The knowledge management literature
is characterised by frameworks for knowledge management implementation which tend to prescribe
best-practice methods to a large range of companies. Although useful, a key weakness of these frameworks
is their inability to account for contextual differences. Consequently many organisations attempt to apply
a knowledge management framework that simply doesn’t fit the organisational context resulting in little or
no benefit from their efforts. A shift in focus from best practice to best fit is necessary to account for
the difference in organisational contexts.
Systems thinking emphasises context as an important element in understanding a system. In the paper
five key concepts from systems theory are used to define the criteria for establishing a best-fit
approach. A social constructionist approach to the research further affords the opportunity to identify
areas of significant variation in knowledge management context and practices within knowledge-centric
organisations. A multi-method research strategy, comprising cluster analysis and case study research, is
proposed to develop insight into the emergence of different configurations of knowledge management capabilities
within different organisational contexts. The multi-method approach also allows for data triangulation.
The conceptual framework of knowledge management capabilities forms the foundation for building a typology
of knowledge-centric organisations, which will enable organisations to choose the most appropriate
approach to knowledge management based on their specific context which varies along the dimensions of
their knowledge-orientation, knowledge management intent and knowledge management enactment.
Keywords:
knowledge management, knowledge-centric organisations, typology, social constructionism, configurational approach, systems thinking
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