Managing knowledge sharing in knowledge-intensive organizations: A relational view.

Important results from the project

Managing knowledge sharing in knowledge-intensive organizations: A relational view.The purpose of the study is to examine what practices, tools and mechanisms that are used in Swedish knowledge-intensive organizations to develop, share, and transfer knowledge. The purpose of the study can be articulated accordingly: What mechanisms or arenas are used in knowledge-intensive firms to improve the knowledge creation, sharing and dissemination on everyday basis? This purpose can be broken down into a series of research questions: Do co-workers in Swedish knowledge-intensive companies participate in systematic knowledge-sharing work? How do they regard their activities? In what ways are knowledge constituted and shared as a collective resource, residing in mutual relations between individuals or groups of individuals? What limitations and impediments do organization members perceive in their day-to-day work?

Expected long term effects

The planned study is expected to generate new knowledge as well as changed practice regarding the mechanisms or arenas that are used in knowledge-intensive firms to improve the knowledge creation, sharing and dissemination on everyday basis.

Approach and implementation

The research methods for collecting data will be participative observations, in-depth interviews as well as work shops. This selection of methods has been chosen since social processes are so complex that they need to be examined by means of methods capturing and giving access to different kind of data. The research team will also arrange workshops were the emerging results and theories can be discussed and further developed. Hence, these work shops will play an important role in collecting data as well as analyzing it.