A Conceptualization of Knowledge Management Practices Through Knowledge, Awareness and Meaning

Abstract

Knowledge management practices are based primarily in conceptual frameworks that are responsible for the design and development of methodologies and technologies that can provide some common ground in the way people use and manage knowledge in an organization. These conceptual frameworks are often derived from integrated perspectives that are influences not by one but multiple disciplines and practices. Can a knowledge management framework be useful and practical when is based on the universal constructs for knowledge, awareness and meaning? Operational definitions for these constructs were designed within a recent research study that was conducted by reviewing and analyzing 180 relevant sources from a variety of disciplines and practices including psychology, cognition and the cognitive sciences, human and organizational development, complexity theory and physics, computer science and artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience and biology, mathematics and statistics. The operational definitions obtained from the research process were combined with general principles that were formulated in order to explore a potential model that may integrate and apply the three constructs of knowledge, awareness and meaning with the view of facilitating the conceptualization of knowledge management practices. The research presents the multiple perspectives from various disciplines on knowledge, awareness, meaning, thinking methods and organic models and at the same time provides a conceptual framework to determine the effectiveness of knowledge management practices with the purpose of integrating the know what, the know how and the know why of managing knowledge.