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The gospel of knowledge management in and out of a professional community

Published: 04 November 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Knowledge management (KM) remains an anomaly in most corporations today. Critics call KM a fad of the 1990s, whereas supporters claim KM is actively evolving. Our work examines the disciplinary rhetoric of KM: how is it that practitioners of KM seek to legitimize their field in the corporate world? We focus on practitioners in the aerospace industry and their forum. We argue that this forum serves as a hub for constructing KM's legitimacy. Our two year ethnography traces the rhetorical strategies utilized by informants in and out of a professional community to legitimize KM as discipline in the aerospace industry.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      GROUP '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
      November 2007
      422 pages
      ISBN:9781595938459
      DOI:10.1145/1316624
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 04 November 2007

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      Author Tags

      1. aerospace industry
      2. community of practice
      3. knowledge management
      4. social construction of technology

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      GROUP07: ACM 2007 International Conference on Supporting Group Work
      November 4 - 7, 2007
      Florida, Sanibel Island, USA

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