Nahapiet & Ghoshal, Blackler, and Cowan, David & Foray

Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage

Janine Nahapiet and Sumantra Ghoshal

The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Apr., 1998), pp. 242-266 

 

This article looks at how social capital can hep create new intellectual capital for organizations. From my understanding of their explanation, social capital is the relationships, knowledge, and information that is shared and utilized by a group of people within an interactive setting such as a community or business. This article looks at how organizations are at an advantage for creating and sharing this social capital which could in turn create new intellectual capital. The article was interesting but I found it rather dull. I was intrigued by the idea of social capital though as this was the first time I had ever really come into contact with that term. Initially I thought they were in some way going to discuss finance, but instead the capital they were referring to exists between individuals or a group of individuals hat comes from sharing the same experiences and environment. 

 

Knowledge, Knowledge Work and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation

Frank Blackler   Organization Studies  1995 16: 1021

 

This was a fairly long article that went into quite a bit of detail, but it brought up some interesting thoughts. The author first looks at how knowledge and its value is currently viewed and utilized within an organization. From here is offers a different approach to the way knowledge should be handled. As opposed to simply looking at what knowledge is already their Blackler believes that focus should instead be placed upon the cultural influences and the things that help create the knowledge. To him the process of how the knowledge comes into being is just as valuable as the knowledge itself.

 

 

 

Cowan, R., David, P., & Foray, D. (2000). The explicit economics of knowledge codification and tacitness. Industrial & Corporate Change, 9(2), 211. 

 

This article looks at how tacit and codified knowledge are used and understood in economics. The authors make the point that the two types are at times confused in regards to their actual meaning. This article went on and on and I really have no interest in economics so it was hard for me to sit through. Not to end on a bad note though I will say that the authors were very clear in their definitions ad descriptions of tacit ad codified knowledge respectively.