Codifiable knowledge and intrinsic knowledge

Kimble, C. (2013). Knowledge management, codification and tacit knowledge. Information Research, 18(2).

Kimble’s article is a review of selected literature on knowledge management and its codification (analysis and organization). He addresses the ideas of a group of economists, their scientific inquiries about knowledge management and suggestions on how to measure certain dubious areas of knowledge. The final product of their quest was the creation of knowledge transaction topography of codified information. Issues of inefficient knowledge management projects and the necessity codification of information are also addressed. At the end of the article Kimble discusses the major “strategic, practical, and epistemological problems of codification” , mainly its applicability, affordability and “desirability.”

The scaffolding of this article is built on the virtually inseparable notions of information and knowledge and their tacit quality. Both Miller and Ancori see knowledge to be defined as information and this information is purely instrumental without any intrinsic value. Contrasting to this is the philosophical concept of knowledge as justified truth which carries message with intrinsic value. According to the realists’ theory external knowledge / truth could not be “apprehend directly” but a given reality could be justified via experimentation and hypotheses. Opposite to the external Meta knowledge notion is the constructivists’ theory which states that common knowledge is a result of the conceptual beliefs shared among epistemic communities. The economists Shannon and Weaver add the importance of communication as part of the knowledge management process and present similar to Miller’s statement that the semantics of the content are not hard-edged, but depend on people’s own interpretations. Kimble briefly discusses Polanyi’s non-positivist view of science and the dichotomy of its explicit and intersubjective meaning. Nonaka’s takes on Polanyi’s idea and defines the explicit knowledge as computational / codified and tacit knowledge as “personal”. Shannon and Weaver’s goal was to find a way to codify cross-knowledge “transactions” using codebooks. The resulted topography precisely shows how knowledge is distributed among the agents but is unclear about what it covers beyond the direct information. As a result the codifying system is incomplete as a whole and applicable only for cases where tacit knowledge is not a variant.