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Knowledge Management Foundations attempts to place knowledge management ("KM" to its friends) on a secure intellectual footing. Unlike most others who have written on this topic, I have been primarily oriented to the institutions traditionally dedicated to knowledge production-that is, universities-whose maintenance has been largely dependent on significant state subsidies. The idea that privately owned corporations might be also in the business of knowledge production is a recent development that raises a host of questions about the exact nature of knowledge in our times. Thus, I proceed by asking what the management mentality does to knowledge, rather than vice versa. It means that my analysis tends to adopt the knowledge worker's perspective, as opposed to the manager's. If knowledge management teaches nothing else, it is that these two perspectives easily rub against each other.

To be sure, knowledge management's challenges are not entirely unwelcomed. As knowledge production has come to involve more people in more expensive activities, the relationship of benefits to costs looms ever larger. Academics are not especially adept at handling this issue, having come to expect indefinite funding for their inquiries. Nevertheless, the knowledge management literature presses the case for knowledge producers to justify themselves with a freshness-indeed, a rudeness-that has not been seen since Jeremy Bentham's original defense of utilitarianism. However, a fine line separates demystification from disempowerment, especially if the power relations among the relevant parties are not closely monitored. This book treads this fine line. Knowledge workers must recognize both their internal differences and their accountability to those who pay their way. However, such recognition need not lead to the mass exploitation-or proletarianization-predicted by Marxists. Nevertheless, it does mean that knowledge workers see themselves as engaged in a common enterprise simply by virtue of producing knowledge. Ironically, the knowledge management literature currently tends to obscure this viewpoint-but not surprisingly, considering the little that professors, industrial researchers, and IT specialists naturally share by way of worldview or work setting.

This book begins by considering the historical and philosophical origins of knowledge management, and the ways it has transformed our understanding of what knowledge is. This transformation has generally gone unappreciated by academics, even economists. Two signs of the times provide the focus for Chapter 1. One is the subtle shift in knowledge from a public to a positional good, one whose value is directly tied to its scarcity. The other is the KM classification of universities as "dumb organizations" (where a McDonalds franchise is a "smart" one). To be sure, these tendencies have been present throughout most of history, but KM explicitly justifies them. However, there are also opposing tendencies, whereby an academic orientation to knowledge production (the "Executive Ph.D.") has begun to infiltrate business as a stabilizing force. Together these two tendencies point toward a major rethink about what exactly is the value of producing knowledge. Chapter 2 probes more deeply the philosophical, economic, and legal peculiarities of knowledge that- up to this point-has made knowledge resistant to a KM-style treatment. Chapter 3 focuses on how information technology has broken down this resistance, even though much of the IT revolution can be understood by extending a standard Marxist analysis of industrial labor to knowledge work. Yet IT enchantment may be found even in the inner sanctum of the academy, as exemplified by my extended debates with "Cyberplatonists," featured in the second half of that chapter. In Chapter 4,1 formally consider the political economy that is needed for underwriting the autonomous pursuit of knowledge- partly to counteract some of the more corrosive KM tendencies. Here I explore the virtues of the elusive brand of politics known. as "civic republicanism," which historically combined the best elements of liberalism and communitarianism. Significantly, republicans prefer the word "governance" to "management." I discuss how universities as a form of organization have come closest to institutionalizing the civic republican ideal. In the Appendix, I explore in depth the issues surrounding the present and future of that characteristic form of academic knowledge production, the peer review process. In the Conclusion, I observe that the difficult questions raised by knowledge management ultimately rest on the rather contradictory terms in which we normally conceptualize knowledge. In that respect, the held is worthy of much deeper thought than it has so far received.

Before we embark on this intellectual journey, I would like to thank a variety of people who represent the full range of those concerned with knowledge management: Steffen Bohm, David Boje, Ahmed Bouzid, Steve Cavaleri, Daryl Chubin, Jim Collier, Art Diamond, Sir Brian Fender, Stevan Harnad, Tomas Hellstrom, Merle Jacob, Hidetoshi Kihara, Kristian Kindlier, Rob Kling, Ron Kostoff, Stephanie Lawler, Brian Loader, Roy MacLeod, Harry Marks, Philip Mirowski, Glynthea Modood, Michael Perelman, Philip Pettit, Sujatha Raman, Greg Ransom, Francis Remedies, Floyd Rudmin, Harry Scarbrough, Esther-Mirjam Sent, Nico Stehr, Jacky Swan, Ed Swanstrom, Stephen Turner, Bjorn Wittrock, and Tarcisio Zandonade. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the support of the U.K.'s Economic and Social Research Council for the work discussed in the Appendix.

279 pages