Understanding a knowledge society

Everybody is talking about a knowledge society, but what does this mean. Is a knowledge society something from the last decade? In order to get a (critical) socio-historic view of a knowledge society, I recommend the book 'Where have all the intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st century philistinism' written by Frank Furedi. I found the following parts resourceful:

... today's postmodernists follow the path set out by the anti-Enlightenment reaction of the nineteenth century. They claim that all knowledge is socially constructed; therefore, all knowledges are incommensurable and all knowledges are in principle, equally valid ...Postmodernists frequently claim that there is no single road to understanding ... Postmodernists have elaborated this idea to suggest that since there are many truths, there are also many valid ways of getting there...

... the tendency to equate knowledge with the insights that people gain from fragmentary experience makes it impossible to have a meaningful common standard to evaluate knowledge claims. By transforming knowledge into knowledges, the role of the intellectual has become compromised. The knowledge of the intellectual can be interpreted as just a point of view with no special significance for society...

Frank Furedi is calling this the relativization of knowledge and that is why educationalists now regard experiential learning as having a status comparable to theoretical knowledge

... the culture of fear that influences the public's apprehension of technological innovation and experimentation coexists with the demand for more science and more knowledge of the workings of the natural world. Similarly, cultural relativism may thrive on campuses and in the arts and the media, but government and business are continually looking for objective knowledge to settle many of the disputes facing society...

... the problem today is not the pragmatic demand for practical knowledge. It is that instrumentalist pressures on knowledge production are rarely contained by a wider quest for understanding...

Literature review: Measuring KM Initiatives

A Knowledge Management (KM) initiative:

• may have a fuzzy beginning and could perpetuate indefinitely;
• attracts varying degrees of legitimacy and leadership support, and;
• comprises both mechanistic and organic dimensions.

Measuring a KM initiative drives from:

• an economic front (i.e. return on investment);
• an strategic front (i.e. further developments organisation-wide, such as growth in market share), and;
• an political front (i.e. positioning as champions of leveraging organisational knowledge).

Elements to measure are:

• measuring activities;
  • System metrics (seek to approximate the usefulness and responsiveness of supporting technologies - number of downloads, site accesses and so on)
  • Output metrics (measure characteristics such as the effectiveness of lessons learned, user ratings, frequency of being rewarded, number of problems solved and so on)

• measuring knowledge assets (also known as intellectual capital);
  • Tools:
    • Skandia Navigator;
    • Intellectual Capital Index;
    • Technology Broker, and;
    • Intangible Asset Monitor.
  • Methods:
    • Direct Intellectual Capital (DIC) attempts to identify various components of intangible assets (is on organisational level)
    • Market Capitalization (MC) assumes that the value of intellectual capital is the difference between and organisation's market value and the book value of its net assets (is on organisational level)
    • Return on Assets (ROA) seek to estimate the value of an organisation's intangible assets on the basis of the organisation's average profits, average tangible assets and the industry's average ROA over a fixed period of time (is on organisational level)
    • Scorecard (SC) is similar to DIC except that they do not assign monetary terms to the intangible assets (is on project level)

• measuring impact on organisational processes (deployed in time-series design);
  • Knowledge Management Assessment Tool (KMAT) - examines leadership, technology, culture, and measurement.

• measuring impact on business objectives (by collecting systemic anecdotal evidence).

Source: Alton Y.K. Chua, Dion H. Goh. Untying the knot of knowledge management measurement: a study of six public service agencies in Singapore. Journal of Information Science, Volume 34, Number 3 (June 2008), pp. 259-274