ABSTRACT
This chapter explores knowledge management’s evolution, particularly the evolution of its assumptions about knowledge and knowledge work, by studying a specific aspect of the knowledge management movement—namely, the technologies designed to solve knowledge problems. In analyzing one knowledge management system from each decade starting in the 1970s, this chapter provides support for the contention that the concept of knowledge management made the role of knowledge, which was typically considered a natural and implicit aspect of organizing, an explicit asset that needed to be managed as a separate organizational activity. However, over time, knowledge management was expected to recede into the background and once again become an implicit, natural aspect of organizing.
