Epistemological cultures and knowledge transfer within and between organizations

The acquisition and transfer of intellectual capital has become an important justification for executing inter-organizational strategies such as mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures. Increasingly, synergies involving the transfer of knowledge resources are key motivations behind inter-organizational arrangements, giving companies unique opportunities to learn as they move outside their historic, strategic, organizational and intellectual capital contexts. For this author, intellectual capital is (and always has been) the fundamental driver of innovation and competitive advantage in companies. At the same time, knowledge management is to be seen as the fundamental activity for improving the effectiveness of the generation, application and sustainability of intellectual capital in organizations. Although strategic management practice, research and philosophy have devoted an increasing amount of attention to issues around the broad label of 'knowledge management', there has been little effort to translate recently developed knowledge management theories into practice. Therefore, it is still commonplace for management approaches preparing for inter-organizational ventures to largely ignore knowledge management or deal with it in an insufficient manner, given the causal ambiguity associated with the components of intellectual capital and their underlying knowledge mechanics. This chapter pursues two goals. First, it introduces the reader to an originally philosophical perspective on organizational knowledge that may possibly allow for some circumvention of the ambiguities associated with appropriately assessing knowledge management in the context of inter-organizational initiatives. It is argued that both companies as a whole and groups of knowledge workers come with epistemological heritages which are more or less conducive to the successful implementation of knowledge transfer objectives and/or the operation of combined knowledge management practices. The chapter adapts the seminal work on corporate epistemological assumptions undertaken by Venzin et al. to a practical framework suitable for assessing the epistemological cultures of units between which knowledge transfers are expected to take place. Reference is made to the notion of epistemological cultures as distinct manifests that emphasize the knowledge of practice and culture shared by a group. A core proposition of this chapter is that understanding the assumptions behind epistemological cultures ensures effective knowledge management and knowledge transfer. The second goal of the chapter is to apply the framework in a case-study and highlight the intricacies involved in assessing the fit of knowledge management perspectives between the functional groups of two professional service companies. This study attempts to analyse how the epistemological cultural heritages including partner- and knowledge-specific characteristics affect knowledge transfer and learning in an alliance context. It shows how failing to properly consider underlying epistemological cultures runs the serious and high risk of the inter-organizational initiative preventing knowledge transfer objectives from taking place from the outset