1 Popular responses to the South African War, 1899–1902 It is convenient for purposes of comparison to examine popular responses to the Boer War or South African War of 1899 to 1902, which involved Britain in a war for the Transvaal, and to the Spanish-American War of 1898, which was fought, ostensibly at least, to free the Cuban people from Spanish oppression. The South African War certainly involved the British working population. The war was fought by members of the working and lower-middle classes, many of whom volunteered. And the war w
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4.19 Technologies and explicit knowledge continued The following examples give a taste of what is now making the transition from research laboratories into commercial products. Large hierarchical information structures are extremely common, whether in libraries, organisational charts or websites. Displaying such large structures is a challenge, and since the user soon runs out of screen space, navigating them can be tedious. Screen 7 shows a system that uses animation and carefully designed graphical effects to give the impression of manipula
4.12.1 Communities of practice and technology Communities of practice are technical and social networks which set the context in which new knowledge arises in daily work, and determine how it is shared and interpreted, what counts as important knowledge and how people become recognised as members of that community: A good deal of new technology attends primarily to individuals and the explicit information that passes between them. To support the flow of knowledge, 4.9.1 Stories for sharing tacit/informal knowledge Once war stories have been told, the stories are artefacts to circulate and preserve. Through them, experience becomes reproducible and reusable. [War stories] preserve and circulate hard-won information within the community. We all recognise that stories are one of the most natural and compelling ways to exchange experienc 4.1.1 Mapping who knows what One of the most widespread ways to represent what you know is to represent who knows what. This avoids the complications of codifying or storing the knowledge in great detail – you simply map the relevant people to a high-level taxonomy, leaving them to give contextualised answers when asked. Initiatives to provide corporate ‘yellow pages’ which map an organisation by what people know rather than by where they work, or alphabetically, have been reported to be extremely popular and succe 3.4.1 Integrating memory systems into the flow of work There has been a substantial amount of research interest over the last decade in group/organisational memory systems. For example, software researchers have investigated the possibility of capturing design rationale, the key reasoning that underpins design decisions (Moran and Carroll, 1996). However, time and again projects have failed. A given information codification scheme encourages particular ways of thinking about information and the problem at hand: typically, information must 1.4 Aims The aims of this unit are: to develop an understanding of the relationships between information, interpretation, knowledge and computer-based representations to summarise the range of different technologies that are available and on the horizon, and how they relate to different kinds of knowledge processes to provide frameworks for thinking about technologies for managing knowledge, and for evaluating the claims made by te References 4.2.1 Three sources of authority According to Weber, there were three major bases to authority.
Charismatic authority means that deference and obedience will be given because of the extraordinary attractiveness and power of the person. The person is owed homage because of their capacity to project personal magnetism, grace and bearing. For instance, management gurus such as Jack Welch, politicians such as Nelson Mandela, or popular characters such as Princess Diana are charis 4.2 Bureaucracy Bureaucracy as a concept has had an interesting career: it begins in France in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the German state constructed by its first Chancellor, Bismarck, was a model bureaucracy in both its armed forces and civil administration. Weber (1978) realised that the creation of the modern state of Germany had only been possible because of the development of a disciplined state bureaucracy and a bureaucratised standing army – innovations pioneered in Prussia 3.1.1 Global convergence? The Nobel Laureate, Douglass North (1990, p. 46), has argued that progress, from a less to a more complex society, is characterised by a lengthy and uneven but unidirectional move from informal institutional rules of practice to formal constraints. Thus, informal sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions and codes of conduct are superseded by formal rules embodied in constitutions, laws and legally enforceable property rights, including intellectual property and copyrights. North argues that the
