ABSTRACT
Within competitive advantage considerations, knowledge has emerged as one of the more strategic assets for organisations. This is notwithstanding a wider and specifically economistic discounting of knowledge as a factor of production. Intellectual capabilities and knowledge/information transformations now have a central place within globalising information economies.
Constructing, transforming and commodifying knowledge and information require new organisational understandings and newer cognitive capabilities of strategic management praxis. Part of this cognitive awareness is a deliberate organisational designing for the role of symbolic analysts. As well, there is an emerging need for the Chief Knowledge Officer function going well beyond the Chief Information Officer requirements as the need is less for information technology-driven restructuring of routine processes, and more for innovation creation capacities associated with critically non-routine functions within organisations.
The chapter 1 considers neglected institutional and organisational dimensions to knowledge creation and knowledge conversion - it reviews the renewed importance of internal recruitment and socialisation within institutions and details knowledge codification and application functions within knowledge-creating organisations. Knowledge management, as praxis, inevitably raises concerns about cognitive failure in leadership theory and praxis.
