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 2.5 Clusters A striking contradiction of the internet revolution is that, although cyberspace allows firms to be located anywhere, they still seem to cluster together in global cities such as New York, London and Sydney (Castells, 2001). Four years after publishing a book proclaiming The Death of Distance, Frances Cairncross noted in the book's second edition that, ‘Economists, most of whom have long ignored or despised economic geography, are now taking a fresh interest in it’ and, after revie References 4.3.1 Product leadership Its practitioners concentrate on offering products that push performance boundaries. Their proposition to customers is an offer of the best product, period. Moreover, product leaders don't build their positions with just one innovation; they continue to innovate year after year, product cycle after product cycle. (Treacy and Wiersema, 1996) For product leaders, competition is not about pric 4 How do organisations become market leaders? Drucker (1992) wrote: The five most important questions you will ever ask about your organization [are]: What is our business? Who is our customer? What does our customer consider value? What have been our results? What is our plan? Can you answer these questions for your own organisation? I don't expect you to know all the answers now. Try to think about them 3.2 Who is the customer?
Customers are people who buy our products and services, and may or may not use them. The key to defining these people as ‘customers’ is that each engages in an exchange relationship that adds value to the organisation providing the product or service. Consumers do not give any value to organisations – there is no exchange relationship. They use products and services, but do not buy them. 3 Do all organisations need to be market oriented? As you have seen, many marketing writers maintain that to be successful all organisations (commercial and non-profit) must be market oriented and must focus their attention on adding value to their products and services to satisfy their customers’ needs. Leaving aside the word profit from the CIM's definition of marketing, at a conceptual level the process of becoming market orientated is concerned with identifying, anticipating and satisfying customers’ needs. Kotler (Drucker, 1992 2.3 Marketing department marketing It is common practice for an entire organisation's marketing activities, such as advertising, sales and market research, to be grouped together in a marketing department. The department's function is to create marketing plan activities that are designed to increase the customer's understanding of existing products and services. The marketing director manages all specialisms. Marketing is seen as ‘what the marketing department does’. 1 What does 'marketing' mean? Before you start working through this course, take a moment to write down what you understand by the term ‘marketing’, either on the basis of your previous studies or the everyday use of the term. 6.2 Conflicting objectives You have just seen how an objective to maximise market share may not be compatible with an objective to maximise profits. Businesses may have multiple objectives, many of which conflict. Think, for example, how difficult it would be for an oil refinery to both maximise profits and minimise the effect upon the environment of its production activities. Similarly, maintaining high product quality while minimising costs would be extremely difficult. Imagine if a business was struggling. Its 4 Conclusion Culture is just one perspective that can help us to understand more about a business. In this course we saw how the concept of culture developed from research into differences between cultures at a national level. Many cultural elements of a business are not obvious, but there have been some attempts in the academic literature to develop definitions and identify influencing factors. It is possible to see, or ‘feel’, that one business is different from another, and that this involves more Keep on learning   There are more than 800 courses on OpenLearn for you to
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(Orr, 1990b, pp. 156, 157)
Barrett, S.M. (2006) ‘Implementation studies: time for a revival?’ in Budd, L., Charlesworth, J. and Paton, R. (eds) Making Policy Happen, London, Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University (Course Reader).
Barrett, S. and Fudge, C. (1981) Policy and Action, London, Methuen.
Budd, L., Charlesworth, J. and Paton, R. (eds) (2006) Making Policy Happen,
Brassington, F. and Pettitt, S. (2000) Principles of Marketing, 2nd edn, England, Pearson Education Limited.
Christopher, M., Payne, A. F. T. and Ballantyne, D. (1991) Relationship Marketing: Bringing quality, customer service and marketing together, Oxford, Butterworth Heinemann.
Curtis, J. (2000) ‘A clear view of CRM’, Marketing Direct, No. 50, pp. 4
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