Governance, Knowledge Creation and Organizing: An Afterthought
Résumé
Governance and knowledge are important considerations in designing the organizations of the future. Among the key phenomena that characterize the evolution of firms and organizations during the past decade, shareholders' power is perceived as having had an important impact upon organizational structures and processes. Corporate governance gives back to the firm's owners the power to influence strategic orientations and decisions that previously were in the hands of the management team. Another phenomenon that has drawn much interest over the past decade - knowledge - has been positioned as one of the most critical assets that an organization must acquire, develop and retain. Several examples show the critical importance of various knowledge creation processes that relate tacit and explicit, individual and collective knowledge: awareness, assimilation, implicit learning, internalization, articulation, appropriation and extension. In this perspective, the community webs described by DeFilippi (2002) may be viewed as boundaryless organizations in which knowledge is created at the collective level mainly through articulation and internalization processes.