Knowledge Management

The limits of our knowledge and legitimacy of our knowledge claims are issues that go hand in hand with the history of thinking since Antiquity. With the advent of the term ‘knowledge workers’, it was only a matter of time before someone collocated the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘management’. Yet great ambivalence exists even among prominent thought leaders in this new “management discipline” regarding the actual use of the term ‘knowledge management’. Diffused in it we find not only concrete, pragmatic business studies and intelligent document analysis approaches, but also epistemological, holistic, constructivist, systems theoretical hyperboles.
Knowledge management is a collocation of words at odds with what it should actually bring together and veiled by naive habits of speech making the discomfort its thought leaders feel for their own neologism far easier to comprehend. Paradigmatic for this is its distorting reception of Polanyi’s concept of knowledge. By means of selected marginalia on the popular modern topic of knowledge management, this article seeks to draw attention to the (mis-)use of the term ‘knowledge’ in modern management theory and practice and indicate the lessons to be learned for educational theory and practice.