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This book brings together three great motifs of the network
society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and
groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations;
and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are
enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the
study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has
the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs
and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of
organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more
recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or
so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and
communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous
excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the
ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly
because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in
fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research
endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs,
perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and
shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research,
there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and
identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill
this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting
backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe
information seeking and knowledge work.
This book brings together three great motifs of the network
society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and
groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations;
and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are
enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the
study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has
the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs
and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of
organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more
recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or
so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and
communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous
excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the
ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly
because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in
fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research
endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs,
perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and
shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research,
there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and
identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill
this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting
backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe
information seeking and knowledge work.
This text details the use of information in organizations and
integrates material from library information science, management
and related disciplines. Sections cover: information models of
integration; information behaviour of managers; and assessing the
value of information.
Organizations behave as knowledge-seeking communities when their
members share beliefs about cause-and-effect relationships, norms
for evaluating information, and values that guide the translation
of knowledge to practice. What are the practices, arrangements, and
mechanisms that make up how an organization knows what it knows?
What are the underlying values and norms that shape the character
and orientation of these methods? What can we learn from failures
and disasters in organizational learning - and how do organizations
become susceptible to common learning traps such as the
self-fulfilling prophecy, groupthink, group polarization, learning
myopia, and selective information processing? In The Inquiring
Organization, Chun Wei Choo examines how an organization's
knowledge-acquisition and information-seeking leads to the
construction of beliefs and the formation of epistemic practices
that can affect its capacity to learn and grow. The book explores
the epistemology of organizational learning and information
seeking; how organizations acquire and justify knowledge; and how
information is sought and shaped to warrant as well as to question
beliefs. It starts from the premise that organizations are
truth-seeking - they seek beliefs which are well supported by
reasoning, evidence, and experience in order to act more
effectively. It then makes the case for a normative view of
organizational knowledge which identifies the epistemic norms that
an organization needs to pursue in order to acquire valid knowledge
and true belief. The book progressively develops a set of
information and epistemic features that are used to describe an
inquiring organization. An inquiring organization is one that is
motivated to acquire knowledge, where this motivation for knowledge
includes not only the pursuit of truth, but also understanding,
creativity, and curiosity. It has developed norms and practices of
information seeking and knowledge acquisition that are
truth-conducive, granting it reliable success in acquiring
knowledge that is advantageous to the organization. It sees
knowledge as the result of an ongoing process of inquiry in which
knowledge is always provisional and always being improved upon,
where beliefs are linked to experience, and the seeking of
knowledge is an inclusive, collective enterprise.
Increasingly, the challenge of management is to create and supply knowledge in order to sustain organizational performance. However, few books on management strategy have been written using this concept as a foundation. This unique volume adopts a knowledge-based approach that will complement, or perhaps supllant, other perspectives.
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