Domesticating knowledge

Citation

Magala, S.J. (2017), "Domesticating knowledge", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 30 No. 7, pp. 990-992. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-09-2017-0330

Domesticating knowledge

What you are reading, dear reader, is the seventh annual issue of a bi-monthly. No, the European Union did not decree that every year will have 14 months instead of 12. But Emerald has decided that some of the limitations of a brick and mortar, or rather paper and ink publishing have been blown away by digital winds of change and therefore publishing seven in lieu of six issues of JOCM per year is OK. For editors, including editors-in-chief, this is good news. It means that more authors will see their papers shared in one of the public places designed and managed explicitly for a negotiation of scientific and scholarly truth. Of course, adding the seventh issue, like the 12th night, has consequences. If seven issues are OK, why not eight, or 80, or 800? If we want to have more papers published, why not switch from peer review before the publication to an open review after the publication. What we have today is a small and well cleaned and protected swimming pool of research papers and a growing ocean of unpublished, unknown, anonymous papers, which never made it to the eyes of their potential beholders. What we should have, according to some, is a new lease of life on universal creative serendipity and a huge ocean of published and available research papers, from which some would be fished out and dissected by curious reviewers under the eyes of the rest of online communities, without any backstage arm-twisting and bureaucratic power struggles. What we have now is an artificial scarcity and gate-keeping power of professional hierarchies. What we could have tomorrow would be an artificial abundance and Wikipedia. Much more vividly and frequently contested. Do we want to domesticate knowledge in this way or do we want to keep it in isolated wild life safari parks of our academic publishing outlets like JOCM?

Be it as it may, the seventh issue of JOCM brings you a portion of 12 papers and closes with a paper with a fairly unusual title, which makes one wonder if it is serious or lets us see a tongue in someone’s cheek. The title in question is “Inter-play(ing) – embodied and relational possibilities of serious play at work” (I would not know what a serious play is – had I not supervised a PhD thesis on serious gaming). Wendelin Kűpers from Karlsruhe discusses the ludification of the online interactions and opens her paper with a quote from one of the forgotten masterpieces of the US American literature, namely from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, an early attempt to deal with the consequences of slavery. But before we arrive at the 12th and last paper in this seventh and last collection published by JOCM in 2017, we go through the remaining 11. The first one has been written by Jamil Anwar and SAF Hasnu from Abbottabad in Pakistan on “Strategic patterns and firm performance: comparing consistent, flexible and reactor strategies” and what they suggest is fairly interesting, namely, that it does not really matter very much if your strategy is flexible or consistent, what really matters is that you have a strategy and do not simply wait for things to happen in order to react as the events come along:

The results show that most of the firms in Pakistan are consistent in their strategic stance (43%) followed by flexible (40%) and reactors (17%). The mean differences in the performance of consistent, flexible, and reactor strategies show that both consistent and flexible strategies performed equally well and outperformed the reactors.

The second paper had been written by Dimitrios Hatjidis from Abu Dhabi and Andrew Parker from Exeter and is devoted to “The relationship between universal network perceptions and dyadic network perceptions and their effect on employees behavioral reactions to organizational change” – basically, the authors try to demonstrate the role social networks play in shaping the employees (in their case – hotel employees) readiness or resistance to change, by showing us that not only networks as such matter but also, and perhaps even more, how these networks are perceived by individuals in question. Notice the phrase “behavioural reactions”, which signals the well-known behavioural turn in the sciences of organization. It is important to notice this behavioural turn, because then we encounter the paper on “Exploring the relationships between business process improvement and employees’ behaviour” written by Danica Bakotić and Ante Krnić from Split in Kroatia. They have conducted a study within an ICT company busy with a project and came to the conclusion that the crucial factor in making or breaking a successful organizational change depends on willingness and ability to share knowledge:

And finally, research results showed that business process improvement enhances knowledge sharing among employees. The success of the business process improvement project depends on knowledge and knowledge sharing. In the business process improvements, employees are faced with many new elements that should be adopted and that should be adapted. The business process improvement will encourage employees to share more knowledge with each other because, in this way they will easily become familiar with the new way of working and will easily gain needed experience.

Sharing knowledge requires a domestication of what we know – the secret theme, which I am currently trying to make less secret to the readers of the present issue of JOCM. The next four papers are different, but all of them deal with a successful integration of diverse components of managed organizations – heterogeneity of cooperative members, gender in panels, maturity and immaturity of management implementing info systems or cross-border M&A deals between Russia and China. The first paper has been written by Constantine Iliopoulos from Athens and Vladislav Valentinov from Halle who studied a Greek rural cooperative with the Habermas-Luhman theoretical models in mind. Their paper bears the title “Member preference heterogeneity and system-lifeworld dichotomy in cooperatives; an exploratory study”. It is followed by “Research on interval optimization of the proportion of female executives based on panel threshold model” written by Xuefeng Shao and Xing Wang from Nanjing in China. Their findings are quite interesting from the point of view of being careful not to overdo politically correct changes in gender composition of organizational bodies:

The results show that the proportion of female executives has an optimal interval. In other words, during the 53.8%-68.4% interval, the proportion of female executives exerts the least negative effect on the enterprise market value and the most positive effect on the company operating performance.

In other words, women should be a majority, but not an overwhelming one. Gwo Tsai, Kuo Tsuang and Li-Chen Lin offer a paper on “The moderating effect of management maturity on the implementation of an information platform system” and Andrei Panibratov from Saint-Petersburg wrote on “Cultural and organizational integration in cross-border M&A deals: the comparative study of acquisitions made by EMNEs from China and Russia” (two case studies of Chinese and two of Russian companies doing the cross-border acquisitions).

Wardhani Hakim and Adji Fernandes from Makassar in Indonesia wrote on “Moderating effect of organizational citizenship behavior on the performance of lecturers” and Piet Moonen from Amsterdam in the Netherlands made a comprehensive review of research on “The impact of culture on the innovative strength of nations: a comprehensive review of the theories of Hofstede, Schwartz, Boisot and Cameron & Quinn”.

The last two papers have been written by Jingming Feng, Hongli Wang, Peter Prevellie and Kunjin Wu from Guangzhou in China on “Why do I contribute when I am an ‘insider’? A moderated mediation approach to perceived insider status and employee innovative behaviour” (notice the red thread of knowledge sharing and using in innovative recombinations) and by Christine Classen and Reinhard Schulte from Luneburg in Germany – “How do conflicts impact change in family businesses? The family system and familiness as a catalytic converter of change”. in both papers the sense of belonging, of being an insider or a member of a family, do matter in eliciting a more innovative and productive behaviour.

Well, business as usual? Hardly. Sharing knowledge and making the best possible use of it requires us to go beyond the JOCM and towards the Wikipedia. Shall we? Should we? Can we?