Knowledge policy

Last updated

Knowledge policies provide institutional foundations for creating, managing, and using organizational knowledge as well as social foundations for balancing global competitiveness with social order and cultural values. Knowledge policies can be viewed from a number of perspectives: the necessary linkage to technological evolution, relative rates of technological and institutional change, as a control or regulatory process, obstacles posed by cyberspace, and as an organizational policy instrument.

Policies are the paradigms of government and all bureaucracies. Policies provide a context of rules and methods to guide how large organizations meet their responsibilities. Organizational knowledge policies describe the institutional aspects of knowledge creation, management, and use within the context of an organization's mandate or business model. Social knowledge policies balance between progress in the knowledge economy to promote global competitiveness with social values, such as equity, unity, and the well-being of citizens.

From a technological perspective, Thomas Jefferson (1816) noted that laws and institutions must keep pace with the progress of the human mind. Institutions must advance as new discoveries are made, new truths are discovered, and as opinions and circumstances change. Fast-forwarding to the late 20th century, Martin (1985) stated that any society with a high level of automation must frame its laws and safeguards so that computers can police other computers. Tim Berners-Lee (2000) noted that both policy and technology must be designed with an understanding of the implications of each other. Finally, Sparr (2001) points out that rules will emerge in cyberspace because even on the frontier, pioneers need property rights, standards, and rules of fair play to protect them from pirates. Government is the only entity that can enforce such rules, but they could be developed by others.

From a rate of change point of view, McGee and Prusak (1993) note that when an organization changes its culture, information policies are among the last thing to change. From a market perspective, Martin (1996) points out that although cyberspace mechanisms change very rapidly, laws change very slowly, and that some businesses will use this gap for competitive advantage. Similarly, Sparr (2001) discerned that governments have the interest and means to govern new areas of technology, but that past laws generally do not yet cover these emerging technologies and new laws take time to create.

A number of authors have indicated that it will be very difficult to monitor and regulate cyberspace. Negroponte (1997) uses a metaphor of limiting the freedom of bit radiation is like the Romans attempting to stop Christianity, even though early data broadcasters may be eaten by Washington lions. Brown (1997) questions whether it will even be possible for governments to monitor compliance with regulations in the face of exponentially increasing encrypted traffic within private networks. As cybernetic environments become central to commercial activity, monitoring electronic markets will become increasingly problematic. From a corporate point of view, Flynn (1956) notes that employee use of corporate computer resources poses liability risks and jeopardizes security and that no organization can afford to engage in electronic communications and e-commerce unprepared.

A key attribute of cyberspace is that it is a virtual rather than a real place. Thus, a growing share of social and commercial electronic activity does not have a national physical location (Cozel (1997)), raising a key question of whether legislatures can even set national policies or coordinate international policies. Similarly, Berners-Lee (2000) explains that key criterion of Trademark law – separation in location or market – does not work for World-Wide Web domain names because the Internet crosses all geographic boundaries and has no concept of a market area.

From an organizational perspective, Simard (2000) states that "if traditional policies are applied directly [to a digital environment], the Canadian Forest Service could become marginalized in a dynamic knowledge-based economy." Consequently, the CFS developed and implemented an Access to Knowledge Policy that "fosters the migration of the CFS towards providing free, open access to its knowledge assets, while recognizing the need for cost recovery and the need to impose restrictions on access in some cases" (Simard, 2005). The policy comprises a framework of objectives, guiding principles, staff responsibilities, and policy directives. The directives include ownership and use; roles, rights, and responsibilities; levels of access and accessibility; service to clients; and cost of access.

See also

Related Research Articles

Information economy

Information economy is an economy with an increased emphasis on informational activities and information industry.

Knowledge transfer sharing knowledge for problem solving

Knowledge transfer refers to sharing or disseminating of knowledge and providing inputs to problem solving. In organizational theory, knowledge transfer is the practical problem of transferring knowledge from one part of the organization to another. Like knowledge management, knowledge transfer seeks to organize, create, capture or distribute knowledge and ensure its availability for future users. It is considered to be more than just a communication problem. If it were merely that, then a memorandum, an e-mail or a meeting would accomplish the knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer is more complex because:

The knowledge economy is an economic system in which the production of goods and services is based principally on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to a rapid pace of advancement in technical and scientific innovation as well as accelerated obsolescence. The key element of value is the greater dependence on human capital and intellectual property for the source of the innovative ideas, information and practices. Organisations are required to capitalise this "knowledge" into their production to stimulate and deepen the business development process. There is less reliance on physical input and natural resources. A knowledge-based economy relies on the crucial role of intangible assets within the organisations' settings in facilitating modern economic growth.

Ecological modernization is a school of thought in the social sciences that argues that the economy benefits from moves towards environmentalism. It has gained increasing attention among scholars and policymakers in the last several decades internationally. It is an analytical approach as well as a policy strategy and environmental discourse.

In the context of an evolving information society, the term information ecology marks a connection between ecological ideas with the dynamics and properties of the increasingly dense, complex and important digital informational environment and has been gaining acceptance in a growing number of disciplines. "Information ecology" often is used as metaphor, viewing the informational space as an ecosystem.

"Information ecology is a science which studies the laws governing the influence of information summary on the formation and functioning of biosystems, including that of individuals, human communities and humanity in general and on the health and psychological, physical and social well-being of the human being; and which undertakes to develop methodologies to improve the information environment" -.

Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, and academics, and any other white-collar workers, whose line of work requires one to "think for a living".

Forestry law

Forestry laws govern activities in designated forest lands, most commonly with respect to forest management and timber harvesting. Ancillary laws may regulate forest land acquisition and prescribed burn practices. Forest management laws generally adopt management policies, such as multiple use and sustained yield, by which public forest resources are to be managed. Governmental agencies are generally responsible for planning and implementing forestry laws on public forest lands, and may be involved in forest inventory, planning, and conservation, and oversight of timber sales. Broader initiatives may seek to slow or reverse deforestation.

Articles in economics journals are usually given classification codes according to a system originated by the Journal of Economic Literature. The JEL is published quarterly by the American Economic Association (AEA) and contains survey articles and information on recently published books and dissertations. The AEA maintains EconLit, a searchable data base of citations for articles, books, reviews, dissertations, and working papers classified by JEL codes for the years from 1969. A recent addition to EconLit is indexing of economics-journal articles from 1886 to 1968 parallel to the print series Index of Economic Articles.

Geoffrey Hodgson

Geoffrey Martin Hodgson is a Professor in Management at the London campus of Loughborough University, and also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics.

Conceptual economy

Conceptual economy is a term describing the contribution of creativity, innovation, and design skills to economic competitiveness, especially in the global context.

Mark Casson, is a British economist and academic. He is a professor of economics at the University of Reading in England. He was Head of Department (1987–94) and is the institution's current Director of the Centre for Institutional Performance.

European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy

The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) is a pluralist forum of social scientists that brings together institutional and evolutionary economists broadly defined. EAEPE members are scholars working on realistic approaches to economic theory and economic policy. With a membership of about 500, EAEPE is now the foremost European association for heterodox economists and the second-largest association for economists in Europe.

Zoltan J. Acs is an American economist. He is Professor of Management at The London School of Economics (LSE), and a professor at George Mason University, where he teaches in the Schar School of Policy and Government and is the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy. He is also a visiting professor at Imperial College Business School in London and affiliated with the University of Pecs in Hungary. He is co-editor and founder of Small Business Economics, a leading academic journal.

A knowledge market is a mechanism for distributing knowledge resources. There are two views on knowledge and how knowledge markets can function. One view uses a legal construct of intellectual property to make knowledge a typical scarce resource, so the traditional commodity market mechanism can be applied directly to distribute it. An alternative model is based on treating knowledge as a public good and hence encouraging free sharing of knowledge. This is often referred to as attention economy. Currently there is no consensus among researchers on relative merits of these two approaches.

Although information has been bought and sold since ancient times, the idea of an information marketplace is relatively recent. The nature of such markets is still evolving, which complicates development of sustainable business models. However, certain attributes of information markets are beginning to be understood, such as diminished participation costs, opportunities for customization, shifting customer relations, and a need for order.

Barbara Czarniawska

Barbara Czarniawska is an organization scholar.

A knowledge organization is a management idea, describing an organization in which people use systems and processes to generate, transform, manage, use, and transfer knowledge-based products and services to achieve organizational goals.

Innovation management is a combination of the management of innovation processes, and change management. It refers to product, business process, marketing and organizational innovation. Innovation management is the subject of ISO 56000 series standards being developed by ISO TC 279.

Collection administration of copyrights describes the use in Canadian law of collective societies to manage licenses for copyrighted material belonging to more than one copyright owner. These collective societies are responsible for granting permission to use the works they manage and setting out what conditions users of their works must follow. Examples of collective societies in Canada include: Christian Video Licensing International and the Canadian Broadcasters Rights Agency

Information policy is the set of all public laws, regulations and policies that encourage, discourage, or regulate the creation, use, storage, access, and communication and dissemination of information. It thus encompasses any other decision-making practice with society-wide constitutive efforts that involve the flow of information and how it is processed.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.