KM University: William P. Hall

My background is in physics, biophysics and biology, and all generations of computer technology. As an academic, I had to manage my own knowledge across many disciplines of science. But after 1980 I wandered off into industry to deal with increasingly complex forms of knowledge, starting with word processing and computer literacy education.

I then progressed through technical writing and documentation management for a software house and a newly computerised bank. For the past 16 years, however, I have held documentation and content/knowledge management (KM) roles for what started as a single project company, which is now Australia’s biggest defence contractor with sizeable exports and which has diversified into several other engineering and technology areas.

In 2000 I started writing a hypertext book, ‘Application Holy Wars or a New Reformation? A Fugue on the Theory of Knowledge’, on the co-evolution of human cognition and our cognitive tools. Writing was easy until I began working on the impact of technological revolutions on organisational knowledge.

I found it impossible to link my ideas developed in practice to the academic and professional literature on organisational KM. I went back into academia to understand why. My solution was to reformulate organisation theory and KM on a wider theoretical basis than they currently have. Six old books that probably are not included in the syllabuses of many KM courses go a long way to provide the basis for this theory.

Karl Popper. 1972. ‘Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach’. Oxford University Press;
Thomas Kuhn. 1962. ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’. University of Chicago Press;
Michael Polanyi. 1958. ‘Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy’, [corrected edition, 1962]. University of Chicago Press.

Given that my path into biology had already wandered through several other disciplines, the scientific approach I used in my thesis was not understood by some reviewers. One said that I was “unscientific” and rewrote one of the papers – demonstrating his failure to understand my approach. Was I unscientific? I had to find a construction of scientific knowledge that was generally applicable and that I could test my work against. Karl Popper’s writings provided this and have deeply informed my thinking about knowledge ever since.

Thomas Kuhn’s work, although criticised by many, introduced me to the concept of paradigms and the difficulties people who hold different paradigms have in communicating with one another. Popper provided me with a theory of knowledge; Kuhn explains some of the barriers that make knowledge-sharing between different communities difficult. Although I only recently found Polanyi’s works, I had to understand him before I could understand my differences with many of today’s KM practitioners.

Polanyi was a professor of physical chemistry who became increasingly religious in the aftermath of world war two and abandoned science for philosophy. Although Polanyi has been ignored by most scientists and academic philosophers because of his religiosity, his writings were adopted in some areas of social sciences and implicitly form the basis for much of today’s KM practice through the influential works of Karl Sveiby and Ikujiro Nonaka.

Unfortunately, Polanyi takes a narrow and subjective concept of what knowledge is. To him the ‘truth’ of any claim to know is ultimately found in personal faith and belief. By contrast, Popper, a professional philosopher, took a broader view of knowledge – encompassing objective as well as subjective forms. Popper agrees with Polanyi that all forms of knowledge are subjectively constructed.

However, he argues that although claims to know about the world can never be proven to be true (fallibilism), they may approach truth through continued testing against the external reality and inter-subjective criticism. The differences between Popper and Polanyi led them to row, such that neither author ever mentioned the other’s work. Their respective followers have perpetuated this failing even today.

Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, 1982. ‘An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change’, Harvard University Press.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, 1980. ‘Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living’. Reidel: Dortrecht.
Georg von Krogh, and Johan Roos, 1995. ‘Organizational Epistemology’. St Martin’s Press, New York.

The first three books explain knowledge in a general sense and personally. The last three develop an understanding of knowledge at the organisational level that transcends the collective knowledge of their members. The first half of Nelson and Winter’s book argues that organisations have forms of knowledge (i.e., organisational heredity) in their own right – such as routines, structural organ-isation, jargon and so on – that account for their different growth and survival rates. Maturana and Varela introduce the concept of autopoiesis and a concept of cognition and knowledge as an emergent phenomenon of organ-isation. Von Krogh and Roos review several views of organisational cognition, including autopoiesis and related concepts of organisational knowledge.

Joe Firestone and Mark McElroy have independently applied much of Popper’s thinking about knowledge to develop an epistemologically based framework for KM practice. Several peer reviewed papers on my own website explain how ideas from these six sources together make a scientifically based framework for KM practice.

William P. Hall can be contacted at the following e-mail address: bill.hall@tenix.com

This month’s tutor

William P. Hall - Documentation & KM Systems Analyst, Tenix Defence, Williamstown, Victoria, Australia

Qualifications

PhD Evolutionary Biology, Harvard, 1973

National Fellow (Honorary) Australian Centre for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Melbourne

Visiting Faculty Associate (Honorary),

Faculty of Information Technology,

University of Technology, Sydney

Special interests

Evolutionary biology of species and organisations: http://www.hotkey.net.au/~bill.hall