Chapter
2
Background Bibliographic Analysis
Articles about
KM were and are being published in the fields of computer science, information systems,
management, engineering, communication, and library and information science.
Ponzi and Koenig [2002] were able to project early on that KM was either an unusually broad-shouldered business enthusiasm or a rather permanent development.
In the early years of KM, it was probably a very safe assumption that almost all KMarticles would have the phrase “knowledge management” in the title, but as the KM field has grown, that almost certainly is no longer a safe assumption. There are now numerous articles about “communities of practice” or “enterprise content management” or “lessons learned” that clearly are KM focused, but they do not use the phrase “knowledge management” in the title.
The significance
of the KM growth pattern becomesmuch more apparent when one compares it with the
pattern of other major business enthusiasms of recent years.
Quality Circles, Business Process Engineering, and Total Quality Management all show an almost identical pattern of approximately five years of dramatic, exponential, growth, then they peak and fall off to near nothing almost as quickly. All the hallmarks are here of a rather permanent development.
There has also
been substantial interest in the academic world concerning KM. The database ‘Dissertations
and Theses’ includes bibliographic information about theses published by
graduate Students at accredited North American institutions from 1861, and
from 50 European universities since 1988. A search of the database showed that
all of the dissertations and theses with ‘knowledge management’ in the title
or in the key word fields have been published since 1996.
‘Knowledge management’ may have been commonly used in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, scholars have adopted terms such as ‘knowledge sharing,’ ‘communities of practice,’ and ‘learning organizations’ as knowledge management processes became more mainstream in organizations. As the twenty-first century has progressed, searches on ‘knowledge management’ have revealed that scholarly works on knowledge sharing have increasingly been combined with research on social networking and social media.
The data seem to indicate that there continues to be a lively interest in research and writing about knowledge management, and presumably that scholars and ordinary people are interested in reading about KM as well. The specific departments and disciplines in which the dissertations were written range from mathematics to mass communication, with business administration being strongly represented.
An interesting observation is that there was a very brief spurt of articles about KM in journals devoted to education, but that interest soon waned. This is likely a function of the fact that KM, as mentioned previously has a very corporatist and organizational emphasis, while for most academic principals, the faculty, their commitment to their field, their discipline and sub-discipline, their “invisible college” comes first.
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